Killer of Men - Christian Cameron [127]
‘By Ares,’ he said. ‘I knew you were beautiful!’
And in those five minutes, in the time that the water-clocks give a man to speak his mind in the assembly, I was no longer a man.
I became a hero.
Most of the other eight men who ran with us were dead or badly wounded. Only Eualcidas and I had made the enemy line. And we had hurt the Medes badly, killing fifteen and downing another twenty. We had captives.
I was so dazed that I was sick. I threw up on the rocks, and Heraklides held my hair. Then we went back down the pass to where we had started. The slaves buried our dead and we waited in the sun. I drank the water men gave me, and then I drained the water and wine in my canteen.
Eualcidas came by. ‘If they come back, will you do it again?’ he asked.
I grinned. ‘Of course,’ I said.
It was like madness, or the smell of fine wine, or that moment when a woman lets her peplos fall but before you can touch her.
You want to know what makes Achilles different from the other men among the noble Achaeans? Homer must have known some killers of men. He knew us. Because any man – any good man, and the world is full of them – can stand his ground one fine day. He sets his mind – or he is angry, or simply young. And he will stand his ground and kill, fighting his fears and his enemies together. We honour those men.
But the killers come alive when there is nothing left but that fear and the rush of spirit, when all of your life falls away and you are the edge of your sword and the point of your spear. The killers will fight every day, not one fine day. Eualcidas was serious. He knew we might have to run into the arrow storm again – and now that he had my measure, he wanted me to run with him.
And of course, I wanted to go.
No, that doesn’t mean I wasn’t afraid. I was terrified. But I had to feel that terror again – and again.
But they didn’t come back, and an hour after dark, we marched away into the torch-lit darkness, down the rest of the pass and on to the plain.
14
Artaphernes followed us on to the plains, but now he had Lydian cavalry and some Medes, and they harried our retreat. We had bought Aristagoras a day, only for him to squander it like the fool he was. And so, just two days later, while my wounds were still un-healed and the aches from the fight at the pass were at their height, he forced us to battle.
Aristagoras arrayed us. He hated the Athenians by then, and he was visibly afraid – a traitor in a losing rebellion. Eualcidas didn’t hide his contempt, and Aristagoras retaliated like any petty tyrant, by putting us on the left and questioning our courage. He put his Milesians on the right, opposite the Medes, and he put the Ephesians in the centre with the Chians and the Lesbians. He set the lines in full view of Artaphernes. The satrap responded by moving his best infantry – Carians, who later joined the rebellion – against us. Unlike Aristagoras, Artaphernes never believed his own propaganda. He knew that the Athenians and the Euboeans were the most dangerous.
Aristagoras set our lines in the late afternoon of the second day after the fight in the pass. We stood in our places until the shadows were long, and then we walked back to our fires and ate. I didn’t have a slave, but Cleon’s slave, a surly Italian boy, made me stew and took my coppers with carefully hidden delight.
Eualcidas and I sat together after we ate. Most men thought us lovers. Perhaps, if things had gone otherwise, we might have been lovers, because he was Patroclus in every way that mattered, and perhaps I was Achilles. At any rate, we sat and talked, and other men came and sat with us – not just Athenians or Euboeans, either. Epaphroditos came with some men of Lesbos, and there were Chians and even Milesians around that fire. We drank wine and Eualcidas’s singer – he had a rhapsode – gave us a thousand lines of the Iliad. His son sang another poem, and Stephanos came, clasped my hand and drank wine with me.
Men treated me differently. I