Killer of Men - Christian Cameron [48]
When you are faced with a killer in the bronze storm, there are two things that tempt you. One is to run. That way lies instant death. The time to run has long passed when the man in bronze is at the end of your spear. The other temptation is to attack. This is a twin child born of the same parent – fear. You attack to prove to yourself that you are not afraid, and because you have no real hope. Or to get it over with. I have seen lesser men kill greater, but it doesn’t happen often, so the second is as hopeless as the first, although it makes a better story for your mother. Because you’ll be dead.
Calchas’s way is the way that takes care, and time, and discipline. But as Dionysius fell, his aspis fouled the killer’s spear and I got a breath to think.
I backed one step and shoved my aspis high and hard against the man next to me. He was Eutykos, a young man from a good family. Later on we were friends, and I loved his sister. I’d met her, of course, at festivals, and she was pretty – but at thirteen you don’t look at girls as much as you should. Hah!
So I locked my shield with Eutykos and the killer’s doru crashed into my aspis – high. He was going for my helmet, but I had tucked my head so that only the top of the helmet came above the rim of my aspis. He swung again and his doru glanced off my helmet, but I had no crest to catch the point and he lost his balance and crashed against me, breast to breast.
Old Zotikos stood his ground. He threw his shoulder against my back and held me against the killer’s shove, bless him. And he went one better. While the killer rained blows of his spear on my head and aspis, Zotikos rammed his spear into the killer’s shield, full force.
I got to breathe.
Eutykos poked at him, too.
On my left, Straton, Myron’s older son, locked his aspis against mine.
Only then did I realize that the voice shrieking ‘Lock up!’ was mine.
Now the killer was facing three men – six, really, because none of our followers flinched – and the spear points were coming for him.
Locked up and secure, we began to kill him. I have no idea who got him. Later, my spear point was bloody and the blood dripped down the shaft and over my hand. But Zotikos also had blood on his and so did Straton. Perhaps we all took him. It doesn’t matter. No man – no man born of women – can face six steady hoplites, even if they are so scared that shit runs down their legs.
That one fight was the battle, for me. I’m sure that other men did great deeds, and I am sure that the prize of honour went to Miltiades the Younger, who cut a red swath through the Thebans and broke their centre. His sword was like a thunderbolt, so men said.
I never saw him. By Ares, I didn’t even see Pater, and I could have touched him with my spear point.
But I saw the killer, and I held my ground.
Still makes me smile, honey.
And then the Thebans broke and we ran them down.
I killed some poor exhausted sod who begged me to spare him. But he didn’t drop his sword and I was too tired to take a chance. Hard to tell what was in my head. I asked his shade for pardon the next day. I think that if he’d let the sword go, or stopped waving it, I’d have let him live. When the pursuit starts, the shield wall collapses, winner or loser, and every man fights on his own. Eutykos stuck by me, but none of the rest of my file-mates were anywhere to be seen, and we picked up prisoners and fought our last fight in the middle of a thousand screaming Attic farmers. Some brightly armoured aristocrat knocked me flat and another yelled ‘Can’t you see the yokel is a Plataean?’ and they ran off elsewhere.
We had no dead. Dionysius was deeply unconscious, and he slurred his words for ten days and missed the third fight, but he lived to thank me for covering his body. That’s what his father thought I did, and it saved my life later.
We picked up our wounded and treated them as best we could. The Athenians had taken it much worse. They had hundreds of dead.
The Thebans had more. The north end of the