Killer of Men - Christian Cameron [136]
I assumed that Hipponax was dead, but that was not his fate, or mine. I touched him to roll him over and be sure, and he flinched and then screamed.
That scream was the worst sound I had ever heard.
It happens sometimes, that a man will go down on the field – a blow to the head or a sudden cut, and the shock of it puts him under. But later he awakens to the awful truth – that he is almost a corpse, lying amidst pain, waiting to die.
That was Hipponax’s fate. He had a second wound, a cut that had gone right into his leather thorax, so that his guts glistened in the torchlight and lay hidden under his body, and when he moved, the pain must have been incredible. But worse than the pain – I’ve seen it – is the realization.
When you see your guts in a pile, you know you are dead.
He screamed and screamed.
Have I not said that I loved him? If not, I’m a fool. He was more my father than Pater – with his humour and his slow anger, his sense of justice and his poetry. He was a great man. Even when I was a slave and he ordered me beaten – even when he threatened me with a sword – I loved him. I hated to leave him, and I knew that if I had not been exiled from his side, he wouldn’t be screaming away the last heartbeats of his mortality amidst the ravens.
I got down in the bloody mud and put his head in my lap.
He screamed.
What could I do? I tried to stroke his face, but his eyes said everything. The unfairness and the pain. Remember that he never wanted war with the Great King. And yet he had fallen with his face to the foe and his spear in a Persian’s guts, while worse men ran.
Have I mentioned the glories of war, thugater? Fill it to the top, and don’t bother with water. All the way. All the way. When I give an order I expect it to be obeyed.
That’s better.
Where was I?
Oh, I’m not even to the bad part yet.
I told you how he screamed. You have heard women in childbirth – that’s pain. Add to that despair – which most women, thank the gods, don’t need to fear in childbirth – and that was his scream.
He’d been out, so his voice was fresh and strong.
After ten screams, I couldn’t think.
After twenty screams, I stopped trying to talk to him.
Who knows how many times he screamed.
Finally, I put my knife under his chin. I hugged him close, and I kissed him between screams, and then I pushed it up under his jaw and into his brain.
Heraclitus had told me once that this was the kindest stroke. I’ve done it often enough, and I know that it ends the screams the fastest. Cut a man’s throat and he has to bleed out.
I don’t know how long I sat there. Long enough to fill my lap with his blood.
‘You – killed him,’ Archi said. His voice was surprisingly calm. I had no idea how long he had been standing there.
Heraclitus had his hand on my shoulder. ‘You are a brave man,’ he said to me.
‘You killed him,’ Archi said again. Now there was a lilt to his words.
‘Archilogos.’ Heraclitus stepped between us. ‘We must take his body and go.’
Kylix came, still crying. He began to strip the armour from his dead master’s body. Another of the house slaves was there – Dion, the water boy. No doubt he had come as Hipponax’s skeuophoros. Together they rolled the corpse off my lap and stripped him. Idomeneus helped without being asked.
‘You killed him,’ Archi said, after the body was rolled roughly in a himation and laid across spears.
Heraclitus struck him – a sharp blow with his hand open. ‘Don’t be a fool, boy.’ He turned to me. ‘Your eyes are younger and sharper than mine. Can you lead the way?’
‘YOU KILLED HIM!’ Archi roared, and came at me. His sword was in his hand, and he cut at my head.
I drew and parried in one motion, and our swords rang together with the unmistakable sound of steel on steel.
It was dark, and the footing was bad. The only thing that kept him alive was that I wasn’t fighting back. He made wild, savage sweeps