Killer of Men - Christian Cameron [45]
‘Take your brother’s armour,’ he said. ‘And take Hermogenes as your shield-bearer. You will stand with the men tomorrow. No more playing with the boys.’
And just like that, I was a hoplite.
5
We marched east, across Attica, and the Thebans retired before us, confused by this turn of events. I sweated in my brother’s armour, and Pater adjusted it at an Attic forge, borrowing tools to change the waist of my brother’s bell corslet and the pinch of his greaves. His helmet fitted me very well.
Pater wept while he worked.
By the third day, we thought that the Thebans would melt away, and then we had word that there was yet another army coming – from Euboea. The Euboeans hated Athens. Truth to tell, Athens is arrogant and most cities hate her.
Then Miltiades’ father showed why he was a strategos to be reckoned with. He woke us four hours before dawn, and we left our fires burning and the slaves and boys to watch them, and we marched east and then north. Men who travelled said we were somewhere near Tanagra. I only knew that the weight of my dead brother’s arms, his panoply, was the same as the weight of a five-year-old girl, and I was carrying it over a mountain.
Miltiades the Elder had a good plan – to march around the Thebans and catch them napping, and force them to fight, cut off from the Euboeans. But the Thebans were no fools. They had spies and scouts, and their slaves probably traded food with our slaves. They knew we were coming, and they marched in the dark, too, determined to ambush us on the flanks of Mount Parnes. And as with most battles, neither plan bore the least resemblance to the mess that followed.
Plataeans were the left of the army, and this meant that we were the rearguard – the last men to march. Crossing the flank of Mount Parnes on goat tracks, we marched in double file – two wide. It took hours to go a few stades, and where I trudged, we seemed to stop more than we walked.
By the luck of tribe and farm, I walked next to Simon. No one had mentioned that he had run from the Spartans. I didn’t even know that he had run – only two or three men had broken, and while I was pretty sure he was one, he wore a plain old helmet with no crest and he had no blazon on the leather face of his shield – like most of our men. Now he walked beside me, and we did not talk.
He was much taller and broader than me. Indeed, I was thirteen, and too young to stand the storm of bronze, but I think that Pater felt that we needed to make up the holes in our phalanx. Who knows what he thought? He never discussed such stuff with me. At any rate, Simon was a head taller and much heavier with muscle. And in the dark, on the flanks of Parnes, I learned what he really was.
His spear-butt flashed in the moon and I ducked. And then he used his hip and almost pushed me off the trail – and off the mountain.
Calchas, dead Calchas, saved my life. Rough-housing with a bigger, stronger man had taught me many tricks. I swayed, armour and all, and got my feet planted. Simon kept right on walking, and the man in the file behind me cursed.
That was the first of three times he tried to trip me, and once I think he meant to put his spear-butt through my eye. But I was wary, and after the third time, someone in the file – we were all neighbours, and Myron’s Dionysius was right ahead of me – someone said something to our phylarch, old Epictetus, and he trotted back and asked Simon what he was doing.
Simon flashed me a smile. ‘I’m just clumsy,’ he said. ‘And this boy can’t really carry the weight of his panoply.’
Epictetus peered at me. I had my helmet up on my head and I was sweating like a deer bleeding out. I tried to grin.
‘Too heavy for you?’ he asked.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Simon’s a bastard.’
Epictetus shot him a glare. ‘Yep,’ he said. Most of our file laughed. ‘Watch yourself, Simon. I’m watching you.’
That’s when I think Simon decided to kill us. Right there on the mountain. Up until then, I think he just hated us quietly.