Killer of Men - Christian Cameron [100]
You run the foot race, honey – and you, sir? Good. Easier to tell this to people who know how games go. But in those days it was all informal. The lord had put up cairns, and we started by one, turned at the other and elbows flew in the turns. If I wanted to beat a man as big as Stephanos, I needed to be well clear of him at the turn, eh? Heh, heh. Otherwise I would have kissed the sand.
Then we watched another heat, this time mostly gentlemen – hoplites, especially Athenians. They were all trained men, and they didn’t even trouble to jostle each other. It was like watching a different sport. And most of them ran naked, which I found – imposing. And odd.
A final heat of local gentry, and a big youth won by knocking most of his competitors flat. Stephanos stood by my shoulder watching. As first and second in our heat, we’d be running in the final. He pointed at the winner. ‘Cleisthenes,’ he said. ‘He’s a right bastard.’
‘I can tell,’ I said.
Kylix came up then, and Archi. Archi shook his head. ‘My own damned fault,’ he said. ‘Hard to be a hero in the night and morning too,’ he quoted from Heraclitus, who was full of such sayings for the young.
‘Archilogos, this is my new friend Stephanos,’ I said, with Ephesian formality. They eyed each other as potential rivals, and I was annoyed that they couldn’t be friends – but neither saw in the other what I saw in both, and they stood apart.
I sent Kylix back for my armour. I looked at Archi, but he shook his head. ‘You have to be the hero today, Doru,’ he said. ‘The only muscles I have that are hard are in my head and my dick.’
That got a laugh from all the men. Indeed, Archi was not alone, and half the men there – more than half – were showing signs of a good night of feasting. I heard later that the man they called ‘Kalos’, the beautiful, the best of the Athenian athletes, was hung-over from the beginning to the end.
So we lined up in the sand for the two-stade final. I was next to the big Chian lordling, with Stephanos on my other side. Luck of the draw.
I’d watched the lordling in his first race, and I knew I’d get an elbow in the ribs off the starting line. So when Lord Pelagius dropped his arm, I shot off from a low crouch just as the trainers in Ephesus taught, bless them. Then I cut diagonally across the field.
The tall, pretty Athenian, Kalos, was on the inside and I let him lead me. From the first, we were alone. There was a roar behind me, and some shouting, but I just kept pounding up the beach, and the naked Athenian was a stride ahead.
Damn, he was fast. And he was better trained, I’d say. Hangover or not, he was the better man. And he wasn’t running full out, either. He was saving himself, measuring me.
I decided on my tactics well before the turn. As we closed on the cairn, I poured it on, everything I had, and I passed him in one burst before he was on to my tactic. I was ahead of him at the cairn by a stride and I angled sharply across him so that he had to lose a stride or risk crashing into the cairn – not the most genteel manoeuvre. Illegal, in the Olympian Games. But that’s youth. And then I hammered my feet on the sand, my trick done, and all there was left was to run the stade back.
There’s a point in the race where it is no longer muscle and training. It’s all in your head, eh? I was ahead. He would put everything into catching me, but my burst of speed must have made him wonder. And I thought – fuck it, if I can burst like that, I can run like that all the way home, if I have the guts.
So I did.
I might have been the depth of an aspis ahead of him when I crossed the line. But by Ares, I took him, and after he vomited in the sand, he came and wrapped his arms around me. ‘Good run,’ he said.
I grinned – I knew he was the better man. And I liked him for his good humour.
In those days, all the games counted and there was no resting. So while I was still breathing hard, Kylix brought my armour for the next race, the hoplitodromos.
That’s a laugh. My armour was an old leather spolas that I bought on the beach from a