Killer of Men - Christian Cameron [118]
Hipponax and Archi were in the same army I was in – there were only eight or nine thousand of us, all in, and I saw both of them every day, at a distance. They must have known that I was with the army, marching just a stade or two from them. I do remember wanting to go to them, every day – a yearning to face them, to receive blows or embraces. I think I believed that they would commiserate with me. Now, I shake my head.
We were fifteen days marching on Sardis, and despite our long delay at Ephesus, we caught the city unawares. Which will give you an idea of how badly prepared the Medes were for us. I think that Artaphernes never really believed that men he had counted as friends and guest-friends – men like Aristagoras and Hipponax – would actually march on him. And so great was the name of Darius, King of Kings, that no man had ever dared to strike at him. Amongst the Ionians, they talked openly of conquering Persia. Amongst the Athenians, they laughed and talked about increasing their trade with Ionia. No man so much as mentioned Persia. I remember that, too.
At any rate, the Persians were unprepared.
When we came down the pass, the scouts told us that the gates of the great city – one of the richest in Asia – were open.
We lost all order. The whole army broke into a mass of sprinting soldiers racing for the gates. At least, that’s how it seemed to me, and I was close to the front. Aristides roared like a bull to make us stand our ground, and we ignored him and raced for the nearest gates.
I followed Herk. He was fast, but nothing like me, and I loped easily, keeping pace. The rest of our file fell behind – Herk wasn’t the fastest, but he had stamina. Other men caught us, and a few passed us, but the upshot was that a dozen of us came to the Ephesus Gate of Sardis, just around the hour men leave the agora, and the gates were open.
Even as we ran up, the Lydian gate-guards finally decided that they were in peril and began to close the great wooden doors – or perhaps they closed them every day in late afternoon.
Herk threw himself at the nearest door and men joined him. I flashed through the narrowing gap and my spear caught a Lydian and killed him, and the other guards broke and fled and the gates were ours, and I was the first man in the city.
Then I saw men behave as animals, and men treated as animals, and it was amidst the slaughter that I awoke from my nightmares of the loss of Hipponax and family and Briseis. I found myself in the wreckage of the agora, watching a trio of Eretrians raping a girl while others looted the stalls in an orgy of destruction, like animals let loose from cages. Oh, you haven’t seen what men are until you see them let loose inside a city.
I did nothing to stop it. It was happening all about me. And my sword was red, and blood dripped down my hand.
The storming of a city is the grimmest of man’s acts, and the one most likely to draw the wrath of the gods. Sardis was defenceless, and the men and women of the city had never resisted us, or done us any hurt greater than taking some of our money in their trades. But we butchered them like lambs.
Some fools set fire to the Temple of Cybele, and that sacrilege was repaid a hundredfold later. But worse was to come.
The initial assault took the city, but we had no officers and no enemy to fight, so we all became looters and rapists, roving criminal bands. The men of the town gathered, first to fight the temple fire and then to resist us, and as the flames spread, they were driven towards the central agora.
Because we had no leadership and no order, we didn’t storm the citadel. I was no better than the rest – I assumed that the city had fallen. I stood in the agora, watching the city burn, refusing to rape and contemptuous of the looters, and I watched the other side of the market fill with men – panicked men, I assumed.
And then Artaphernes was there. His armour glittered in the fires, and he led the Lydians of the town and his own picked men of the citadel straight at us, and the Greeks were scattered the way sheep