Killer of Men - Christian Cameron [104]
Not just sour grapes. Archi and I were always a dead match, except as swordsmen. If I was winning, he’d have been with me – except that the luck had been going my way in every encounter. It takes luck to be a winner. I’ve seen the best man trip on a stone or lose his footing in a match. Read the chariot race in the Iliad, honey – that’s the way of it. The best man does not always win.
Or maybe it is the will of the gods, as some men say. Or the logos seeking change, so that one man does not dominate others, or to effect some other change.
I was never a great man with a javelin. I’ve killed my share of men with spears, thrown and pushed, as they say, but that’s because the daimon in me doesn’t lose its skills in the press of bronze. In a contest, I can’t throw as well as other men, and that’s a fact.
But that day I threw the best spears of my life. My first throw did it – which god stood at my shoulder I don’t know, but I smelled jasmine and mint and I swear that it was Athena putting her hand under mine and lifting my spear. Other men matched my throw, and Cleisthenes beat it, the bastard. I threw twice more, and never came within a stride of my first throw.
I placed seventh. Cleisthenes won. But I placed in the top eight, and by the Chian rules I had won or placed in every contest, and no other man had done that. Cleisthenes argued that he had, but his grandfather overruled him, saying that he had failed to finish the two-stade run.
I had won. I couldn’t believe it.
I think my slavery really ended there, on that beach, just before the sun started to swoop for the sparkling blue sea. I wasn’t just free – I was a man who could win a contest with hundreds of other free men.
We Greeks love a contest, and we love a winner. They mobbed me, and I was kissed a little more than I liked and patted a little too much, but I didn’t care. They put a crown of olive leaves in my hair.
And then Lord Pelagius took me aside.
‘Listen, lad,’ he said. ‘You’re the winner – clear winner. No judge even needs to count.’
‘There was a goddess at my shoulder, sir,’ I said.
He nodded. ‘What a very proper thing to say! Who was your father?’
‘Technes of Green Plataea, lord.’ I bowed.
‘I gather you were a slave?’
‘I was taken,’ I said. ‘The family that had me – freed me.’
He nodded again. ‘A fine story. Damned fine. The way good people should act.’ He was an old aristocrat, and he had the best notions of how his class ought to behave. A few of them do.
The rest are rapists and tax-takers with pretty names and better armour.
At any rate, he put his arm around my shoulders. ‘Listen, lad. You asked to fight with the sword. You’re welcome to do it – we can all see you’re a trained man. But after winning today, no one – and I mean no one – will think you’re a shirker if you want to step aside.’
But, ignoring the hubris of it, and the sound of wings I might have heard, I shook my head. ‘I want to fight, lord.’
He smiled. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I can’t give you your prize yet. So go and armour up.’ He meant that all the prizes were given at sunset.
So I put on my old leather spolas, not a tenth as glorious – or protecting – as the scale shirt I was so soon to own. I put my aspis on my arm and my crude, cheap and cheerful helmet on my head, picked up my meat-cleaver sword and went down to the lists.
In those days, we took wands – willow or linden, usually – and planted them at the four corners of the lists, and then we fought to the first cut. Men died from time to time, but most men were careful, and few fought all out in the lists.
Calchas had told me about such fighting, back on Cithaeron by the shrine of the hero, and I had thought that it sounded like the Trojan War. Here I was, five years later, standing by a row of black ships on a beach with a blade in my hand and the weight of my bronze helmet pressing down on my nose. While I listened to the