Killer of Men - Christian Cameron [134]
Once dark falls, it is the worst place you can imagine.
May the gods preserve you from ever having to visit one in the dark or pass your last hours there, although I always expected it for myself. It unmans me just to think of it. Better a clean death in the heat of battle, so that the soul goes burning with the pure fire of strife to the logos, than the foul death amidst the carrion-eaters.
And women and children who have to go searching among the corpses for a father, a lover, a brother, a husband – by Hades, that is a cursed way to see a man for the last time, with the ravens picking at his eyes.
We walked down from the hill that the Athenians and Eretrians had held, and darkness fell as we made our way among the corpses. I didn’t know it, but it wasn’t so bad there, because the worst of the kills happen after one side runs – and we didn’t run, and neither did the Carians, so there were not as many dead as there might have been.
It was down in the valley that the corpses became thick, and they were all Greek. Hades, but they were thick, honey. The darkness hid the worst of it, except for the sounds, but I still had to stop and retch when I saw a dog rooting inside the chest cavity of a man and his eyes seemed to move. The slaves saw and dropped the body. When I had finished retching I put my spear in the man’s throat to make sure.
I think the slaves wanted to run away.
I didn’t blame them, but I wiped the spear and then myself. ‘If you won’t carry him to the ships, I’ll run you down and add you to the pile of bodies,’ I said.
Neither of them met my eye. They picked up the spear-poles and we started off again, stumbling and cursing.
There were pinpoints of light in the dark, most of them in a clump to the west. We made to skirt around them, and ran into our first patrol.
I had assumed that the battlefield was empty except for scavengers and mourners, but of course the Persians, who organized everything in their lives, had patrols to keep the scavengers from the corpses of their own slain until the sun should rise again. I heard them in time, and the three of us lay flat. There was some moonlight, just enough to make the whole scene hazy and hard to see, like a foul dream. I lay there, the pale circle of my face hidden in my cloak, and listened.
All I could hear was a dying man at my side grunting. He tried to grab my elbow.
‘Please?’ he managed. The poor bastard had lain there for six hours or more. No water. I could smell his guts.
I elbowed him. Now I could hear footsteps.
‘He-eh? He-eh?’ the dying man said. And little grunts and mewls, like those a toddler makes.
‘Camel-fuckers!’ a Persian voice said. They were close. ‘Come to loot our dead, the cowards. Effeminate boy-fuckers! I hate the Greeks. Run from a battle and come back to steal from the dead!’
The man ranted on and on, as men do after battles. I didn’t know his voice.
‘Shush, brother,’ another voice said. ‘Shush. Ahriman walks the dark. No man should curse here.’
‘Heh-eh,’ the dying man cried. He gave a convulsive jerk.
‘What was that?’ the first Persian said.
‘Men take a long time to die. Come, brother. Keep walking. If I stop, I will have to start getting water for these poor bastards.’ The second Persian sounded familiar. Was he someone I knew?
It didn’t matter, because even Cyrus and Pharnakes would kill me if they took me, or so I thought.
‘Boy-fuckers,’ the man who was angry spat, and they walked off. I heard him stumble on a corpse, and he fell. ‘Ah!’ he cried. ‘I am foul with the juices of his body.’ His voice shook. ‘I am unclean!’
The second Persian spent half the night reassuring him. He was a good man, that one. While he talked to his frightened brother, he emptied his canteen