The Great King (14 page)

I came to the place where the valley really widens, just east of the hippodrome, where I could see – and smell – the camp, and it looked as if someone had kicked an anthill. The entirety of the Lacedaemonian delegation was out – a dozen on horseback, and the rest running or walking into the hills or along the river.

The one who found me was Gorgo. She was astride a horse like a man – or a Scyth – and she cantered easily along the river bed as soon as she spotted me, and reined in half a horse-length away.

She wore a man’s chlamys over one shoulder and was otherwise naked. It must be noted – Spartan women do not live like Athenian women, and they train in public, take exercise, and apparently think nothing of nudity.

The ephors were quite right for not exposing her to die as an infant. Her body was . . . remarkable. I’m not sure I’d ever seen a woman so graceful and yet so fully muscled. And she could ride.

I struggled to meet her eyes. There was so much of her to enjoy.

‘How is he?’ she asked as soon as she saw that I had the young charioteer.

‘Nasty bump on his head,’ I said. ‘Deeply unconscious.’

She dismounted, threw the reins over her horse’s back, and knelt at the back of the chariot, looking at the fallen man. She peeled back his eyelids with a Laconian practicality, and nodded.

‘Doctor,’ she pronounced. She sprang on to her horse. ‘Follow me.’ Then she paused. ‘Will I start a riot?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I know a doctor.’

‘Good. Come and tell me.’ She paused. ‘Please.’

Well, if you can’t see the comic aspect to this, I think you’re dead.

At any rate, I drove the four-horse chariot right to the door of a tent where Dionysus of Ceos – one of the men who’d been drinking my wine the night before – was just towelling his hair. He tossed his towel to a slave and knelt by the chariot for a moment, pulled up the eyelids just as Gorgo had, and nodded to me.

‘I don’t think he has any broken bones,’ I said.

Dionysus ran his thumbs very gently around the edges of the contusion and then around the rest of the head, and nodded. ‘Get him out of the sun,’ he said. He looked at me.

I shook my head. ‘I found him, and the cart,’ I said. I pointed at the still-swelling contusion. ‘Sling?’ I asked.

Dionysus nodded. ‘Oh – you’re the famous soldier. I guess you’d know. Yes. Sling stone, or something like it. It might have been thrown, but it was perfectly round. Or near enough.’ He scratched his beard. ‘Who is he? A competitor?’

‘Competitor and owner,’ I said. ‘Spartan. I met him last night. Polypeithes.’

Dionysus had the good grace to look impressed. ‘His father was a famous wrestler. I’ve stitched him up a dozen times.’ While he spoke, his slaves brought cold water and laid cloths on the young man’s head. Four of us – two slaves, the doctor and I – laid him on the doctor’s bed and made him as comfortable as we could.

The doctor was looking at my leg. ‘Wound?’ he asked.

I nodded.

He shook his head. ‘Beyond me. If only there was a way of stitching up sinew the way we can stitch flesh.’

I grinned. ‘I can still run. Not fast, but far.’

He nodded. He was back to his patient. ‘You are right – trust a soldier – no other breaks. Nasty bruise on his hip – that’s where he fell.’ He looked at me. ‘You his friend? Partner?’

I shook my head. ‘I met him last night. But I’ll tell the Spartans. I promised their queen I’d report.’

‘Who – Gorgo? Damn, there’s a woman.’ He grinned. ‘Like an anatomy lesson come to life.’ He laughed.

‘You know her?’ I asked.

‘Everyone at the Olympics knows her. She’s one of the best patrons here. Lacedaemon funds many events here, and medicine is not the least of it. If it were not for Sparta’s involvement, Elis wouldn’t always be able to pay the bills.’

He looked at the young man at his feet. ‘He’s with the gods, but unless I miss my guess or he is awfully unlucky, he’ll be awake in an hour and have nothing worse than a sore head and a patch of missing memory for a few days.’

I left with a hand clasp and drove – still naked – around the stadium to my own camp, where I was much mocked by my so-called friends for driving a chariot naked.

‘Ares come to life!’ Megakles laughed. ‘Or are you hoping some young girl will come and play Persephone to your Hades?’

Men made the horns against ill-luck because Megakles mentioned Hades, which he did at least six times a day.

Ka admired the team. ‘Those are
horses
,’ he said. He grinned at me. ‘I could teach you to drive better.’

I laughed. ‘Almost anyone could. Hector – a chiton and a chlamys, so I don’t look like a beggar for the King of Sparta!’ I motioned to Brasidas, who was stripped for exercise. ‘Come with me. You can translate their silence,’ I mocked.

Brasidas shrugged. He snapped his fingers at his body slave and the man ran for his clothes.

Brasidas joined me. His face was serene – as almost all Spartan faces are, at almost all times – but his body communicated his tension. ‘I am not the right man to accompany you to the kings,’ he said.

It occurred to me – not for the first time – that Brasidas’ Laconic comments on the subject of his exile might have left out a great deal of detail.

I drove cautiously. Ka had watered the horses, but they were done – so tired that they only kept their heads erect with difficulty. Panic affects horses as much as men, and nothing tires a man like terror. Sometimes, I think that fear and fatigue are the same animal.

So I moved no faster than a man walking, and Ka ran along with us, talking to the horses – I began to suspect that Ka preferred horses to people – and we must have made a strange little party. Except that it was three days until the opening ceremony of the Olympics, one the greatest bloodbaths in the Hellenic world, and there were forty thousand men, women, children and slaves on the plain of the Alpheos, and every eccentricity in the Greek world was in easy sight. We probably weren’t the strangest thing by a long chalk.

But we were odd – and magnificent – enough: a Spartan warrior, a Plataean in a magnificent cloak, and Ka – the essence of grace.

We crossed the plain to the Lacedaemonian camp. Unlike all the other camps, it was neat and orderly – almost four hundred small tents and a number of simple awnings and a few larger tents. I made the natural assumption that the small tents were for the ‘average’ Spartans and the larger tents for – whom? The royals and the ‘nobles’?

In truth, like most Greeks, I knew nothing of Spartans or how they lived.

But as the chariot rolled to a stop in the small square in the middle of the larger tents, I recognised where I had seen the layout of their camp before.

Crete.

I’d spent a year training Neoptolymos – may his shade burn bright and go to Elysia! He and his father, old Achilles, were typical Cretan lords – rich, but living hard, in squads or ‘messes’ of ten aristocrats, doing nothing but making war and hunting. This is the Cretan way.

Around the central square of every town in Crete are the barracks of the aristocrats. Most of the aristocrats never go home – their wives live with the slaves, mind the children and the money, and the men hunt, and make war.

I thought all this in the time it took for the wheels to stop and a pair of helots to leap out from under a low awning and take my reins with a matched pair of surly bows.

One of the helots snarled something at Ka. Ka ignored the man and came over to stand by me.

‘I’ll go back to our own camp now,’ he said. I nodded, and he ran.

By the time I turned my attention back to the helots, Gorgo and Leonidas were there, as was Polypeithes’ father, Calliteles. He was tall and broad with a heavy forehead and an enormous nose; he was one of the few ugly Spartans I ever met. Of course, he’d won the Olympics – and the Nemean games – for wrestling, so no one minded his heavy, dog-like face very much.

Brasidas dismounted from the chariot. He didn’t say anything, nor did he turn white or allow his hands to shake – despite which, he gave me the impression of a man who’d have preferred to run back to our camp with Ka.

Gorgo put her hand on my arm with the familiarity of long association. In fact – and this is one reason that Spartan women are so very confusing to Greek men – I’m not sure that any other well-born Greek woman has ever put a hand on my arm in such an intimate fashion. Jocasta – wife of Aristides – might be accounted my friend, and I’ve sat in her exedra or at the edge of her kitchen many times, telling a story and even holding wool for her as she weaves, and never – never – has she touched me.

I’d known Gorgo for less than a day, and she put a hand on my arm with a disturbing warmth. This is why non-Spartans believe all Spartan women to be licentious. They are not – they are merely without so-called ‘womanly’ reserve.

Perhaps I go on too much, but you must understand what an impact the Lacedaemonians had on me. I affected to despise them – no, in reality I did rather despise them. But to walk among them was rather like a man walking among the gods. In a gathering of fifty Spartans, there was no man with flesh on his belly – no woman with sagging breasts. Their arms showed the muscle of high training. All of them. Their skin glowed with health and expensive oil. Their hair was long, impractical and scented – all the time. I suppose that I had considered Brasidas an exceptional man. Here – among his own kind – I realised that he was ‘merely’ representative of a kind.

Well.

Gorgo put a hand on my arm, and Leonidas smiled. ‘Welcome, Plataean!’ he said. He offered me his hand, and we clasped hands and then the hulking mass of Calliteles all but obscured the sun. But in that moment, Gorgo saw Brasidas. And the king saw her head move and the flicker of emotion around the corners of her mouth, and he looked. His lip twitched.

Then all I could see was the mountain that was Calliteles.

‘I gather my son owes you his life?’ he said. His voice was flat, eyes giving nothing away.

The pressure of his hand on mine, however, told a different story. Since I wasn’t a Lacedaemonian, I smiled and shrugged. ‘I suspect his chariot would have stopped,’ I said. ‘By the favour of the gods, he had fallen well – on to the floor of the chariot.’

Gorgo looked at me and raised an eyebrow. Let me say that now she was as well dressed as any matron in Athens – a superb wool chiton worn in the old Dorian fashion, heavily embroidered, especially on the fall of the peplos. She wore a lion-head bracelet on her right arm and a simple white linen fillet in her hair.

I took her raised eyebrow for interrogation, and I nodded. ‘The doctor – an admirer, may I add, of you both – reports that until the young man awakens from his sleep, he is with the gods and there is nothing to be done.’

Calliteles nodded, face under control. ‘Thank you, stranger,’ he said.

I glanced around. There were twenty Spartiates in the square, by now, but they stood at a distance – I had only Brasidas, the king and queen, Calliteles and a pair of helots within earshot. I looked at the helots.

‘Unyoke the horses and see to them,’ Gorgos said without so much as turning her head to the slaves.

With a rattle of harness and wheels, the chariot moved off, the tired horses swishing their tails to keep off the flies.

‘He was hit with a sling stone,’ I said. My words were well covered by the movement of the chariot, but Gorgo and Leonidas heard me. The king’s eyebrow went up. Gorgo smiled.

That was an odd reaction.

The silence went on. Lacedaemonians can be uncomfortable ‘friends’ in a social situation. They speak very little, and I had learned with Brasidas that one had to exercise a great deal of patience to have a conversation.

So I consciously relaxed my muscles and stood easily, waiting.

‘I understand that you speak Persian?’ the king said.

That was unexpected. ‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Thank you,’ said the king, inclining his head very slightly.

I nodded. Emulating the Lacedaemonians is a chancy business at best. But if they weren’t going to be more talkative than this – well, I didn’t particularly need them, either. And you’ll note that they had not spoken to Brasidas or recognised him in any way. This annoyed me.

I suppose that I allowed my annoyance to show. I am, after all, a Boeotian from Plataea, and I have not been schooled my whole life to give nothing away on my face.

Far from it.

As I turned away, the king extended his hand, palm down – a rhetorical gesture that came naturally to him, I think. I paused.

‘Why do you bring this man into my camp?’ he asked.

‘He is my friend. And a Lacedaemonian. It seemed natural enough.’ I knew I was at the edge of being insulting. But I was, as I say, annoyed.

The king’s eyes never left my face. ‘Perhaps he was born in Lacedaemon,’ the king said. ‘He has chosen not to be a Spartan.’

Bloody Spartans.

‘I’m sorry I took you,’ I said.

Brasidas smiled. ‘It might be best if you didn’t take me again,’ he said.

‘I gather this means I’ll have the continued pleasure of your company commanding my marines?’ I asked.

‘You use so many words,’ he said. And shrugged. ‘Yes.’

Astylos slept for a long time, and then he ran. He ran short, fast distances and then some longer ones – then he stretched, with Polymarchos helping him, and then he did it all again. I watched him, and I learned a great deal about stretching.

When the heat of the sun was gone, Polymarchos had a brief conversation with Ka, and Ka stripped to a loincloth – the Africans lack our views on nudity – and ran with Astylos. The Greek man was faster, but the African could stay with him through almost anything, and Astylos had to work very hard to put more than a stride or two between them.

Polymarchos stood with me. ‘Really, it is a pity we can’t find some way to make Ka a believable Greek,’ he said.

One of the few requirements of the Olympics was that a man had to be free-born and Greek. The definition of Greek was sometimes elastic and sometimes very rigid – these things come and go. But at minimum, it required that a man speak Greek perfectly. The colour of a man’s skin was not nearly so important.