Killer of Men - Christian Cameron [43]
Pater returned his bow, head dripping water. I remember how the water from his canteen mixed with the blood on his hands and arms.
‘Cleomenes, King of Sparta, requests your permission to retrieve and bury his dead,’ the herald intoned.
Pater didn’t smile. I did – I was wearing a smile as big a wolf’s. Hermogenes had his father’s aspis on his own arm and he was grinning like a fool. Bion was grinning too. But Pater simply nodded.
‘Our archon is dead, and our polemarch is badly wounded.’ Pater turned to the Plataeans. ‘Am I in command?’ he asked.
Again there was no cheer – just a soft grumble. But every man in the first two ranks nodded. So Pater turned back to the herald.
‘The Plataeans grant the truce,’ he said. No mention of himself or his own name. Oh, he made me proud.
And with those words, the Battle of Oinoe came to an end. The Athenians killed a hundred Peloponnesians, more or less – the slow ones, I assume, since the Peloponnesian allies didn’t linger to fight. They put up a magnificent trophy on the Acropolis, a chariot and a set of slave fetters, to celebrate their victory over the Spartans. The Medes later pulled it down and took the bronze, but the base is still there with eight lines of verse. They don’t mention us. But on the day, they treated us like heroes come to earth. Miltiades ran up, his plume nodding, and embraced Pater and then every man he could find. His investment had paid off.
Men began to trickle off the ground. We had our dead to bury, and the Spartan helots were coming for their own.
We had forty-five dead. Seven of them died in the week after the battle, so on that morning, we had thirty-eight bodies. And one of them was my brother. He lay with his face to the enemy, a Spartan spear in his right side under his sword arm. He fell clutching the spear, and the other fifth- and sixth-rankers brought the Spartan down and killed him because my brother held that spear point with his dying hands.
I wept. Pater wept. Bion and Hermogenes wept, and Myron and Dionysius wept. We all cried.
The Spartans had nine dead. Two more died later – so we lost forty-five to their eleven. If you want to understand the heart of phalanx fighting, honey – and I can see you don’t – you need to see that Pater killed three of those Spartans and that our whole thousand lived or died by the actions of a few valiant men. Myron didn’t give a foot of ground. Bion followed Pater into the hole Pater made. Epictetus and his son gave ground, but then they locked their shields with men in the second rank and held the rush, and Dionysius killed a Spartan in the fifth rank when they broke through. Take away any of those actions and the result is different.
Karpos, our best potter, died, and Theron, son of Xenon, who made all the harnesses and wineskins and much of the armor the men wore. Pater said he was the first to die, a Spartan spear in his throat at the first contact, and he didn’t live to see Cleomenes come to us for truce – after refusing our embassy.
We buried the dead – the boys and the slaves did the work. The men sat and drank. They had endured the storm of bronze for the time it takes a man to run the stadion, and they were exhausted.
That night it rained. We were wet and cold, but Pater came and wrapped his arms and his heavy Thracian cloak around me. He was still crying, but he held me tightly, and after a while I slept.
The rain stopped, and I was cooking eggs – I’d purchased a Boeotian hatful from a shy girl who had crept into our camp with the dawn. I used Pater’s money, and his flash of a not-quite-smile told me I’d done right. I had a fine bronze patera with the figure of Apollo as the handle. It wasn’t Pater’s work – it was his father’s work, and the planishing on the pan was like a reminder of greater days. If we’d lost, it would have been loot for a Spartan.
Miltiades came to Pater with a wagon. He had a dozen Athenians with him, important men with Tyrian purple in their cloaks. Pater was eating a bowl of eggs with a scrap of stale bread.