Killer of Men - Christian Cameron [135]
‘Eh-eh-eh . . .’ said the dying man at my elbow.
I looked at him, and he was younger than me – and kalos, even at the point of death, with big, beautiful eyes that wanted to know how his world had turned to shit. His skin, where it was not smeared with sweat and puke, was smooth and lovely. He was somebody’s son.
I drew my short dagger, really my eating knife, from under my scale shirt where I keep it, and I put my lips by his ear.
‘Say goodnight,’ I said. I tried to sound like Pater when he put me to bed. ‘Say goodnight, laddy.’
‘G’night,’ he managed. Like a child, the poor bastard. Go to Elysium with the thought of home, I prayed, and put the point of my eating knife into his brain.
Give me some fucking wine.
Oh, war is glorious, thugater.
I dream of him. I never saw his face in the dark, you see. He could have been anyone. Any one of hundreds of men I’ve put down myself. Battlefields, sieges, duels, ship fights – all leave that wastage of dead and near dead, and every one of them was a man, with all of a man’s life, before the iron or the bronze ripped the shade from him.
It’s funny. I have killed so many men, but that one comes back to me in the dark, and then I drink more and try to forget.
Here, fill it.
The Persians lingered and lingered, but at last the older one got his brother to walk away into the dark, and I picked myself up, found the two slaves and we headed west to avoid more Persian patrols.
West brought the sound of mourning. Here the Persians and the Lydians had reaped the Ionians like weeds at the edge of a field, cutting them down from behind as they fled. Now local women were out looking for their men, and fathers and children, with torches. The Persians didn’t disturb them, and they thought we were more of the same – which we were, or close enough.
As the moon climbed, we could see the curved line of corpses like sea-wrack on a beach, and men and women desperately turning them, pushing torches down to look into a face. Grim work.
I knew Heraclitus by his voice. He was talking to a boy and the boy was weeping by his side. I couldn’t help myself. I walked up to him in the dark and he raised his torch.
‘Doru!’ he said. ‘You live!’
I threw my arms around him. I wept. I was no different from the younger Persian – I was unmanned by my reaction to the fight and then to the battlefield.
He let me cry for as long as my heart beat a hundred times – no longer. ‘You are searching for him too?’ he asked.
‘I – I came for Eualcidas. Of Euboea.’ My voice shook. ‘Searching for who?’
Heraclitus nodded. He had a torch and it made his face look like a statue’s. His eyes were pools of darkness. ‘Hipponax fell here, trying to keep the line from breaking,’ he said.
‘Ah.’ I choked. I remember that suddenly I couldn’t breathe. The weeping boy was Kylix, the slave. ‘Is Briseis here?’ I asked.
‘Don’t be a fool,’ Heraclitus said. ‘News won’t even be in the city yet.’ More softly, he asked, ‘Will you help me find him?’
‘Put the body down and rest,’ I said to the slaves. ‘These are friends.’
Lekthes came and touched my arm to get my attention. He pointed to the river, which was clear, just a stade away in the moonlight. ‘We are close, master,’ he said.
He didn’t want to risk his soon-to-be-accomplished freedom, he meant.
‘Stow it,’ I growled. I came back to Heraclitus. ‘You fought?’ I asked. I had a hard time picturing him in the phalanx.
‘Do I look like a slave?’ he asked. ‘Of course I fought.’ He reached out and touched my sword. ‘This is a bitter night for me, Doru. And for you – I know.’ His eyes were shadowed, but I knew he was looking over my shoulder. ‘Help me find him,’ he said quickly.
‘Of course, master,’ I said.
I found him in a matter of moments. I knew his bronze-studded sandals. I had put them on his feet often enough.
I sobbed to see that alone of the men at that part of the line, he lay with his face to the foe and he had