Beside me, Aristides and Heraklides and all the files on either side of mine pushed forward into the hole I was cutting, and they pushed.
And then, as suddenly as the storm of bronze had begun, it was over. The pressure on my chest faded and then it was gone. The dust rose and I punched my borrowed spear at a man as he turned away, knocking him sprawling without killing him. As I stepped over him, he tried to roll and get his shield up, but I put my spear point into the unguarded spot at the top of his back and it grated on his spine and he thrashed like a gaffed fish, dead already and alive enough to know it.
Cleon grabbed one of the wings on my scale shirt that covered my shoulders and tugged.
‘Let’s go!’ he said.
The whole Athenian phalanx was turning away into the dust. The Carians were running, and we were running, too – unbroken, but we knew what was coming.
I wanted to run every fucking Carian down and kill them. They were just men, under all that bronze, and now that the power was on me I wanted to punish them for making me afraid.
That’s how men feel when the enemy breaks – for a little while, they all become killers, and many husbands and fathers die before they regain their wits and realize that the enemy is running and they can sit down and revel in victory.
Men are fools.
Cleon was not a fool, and he’d held my back like a champion in story and probably saved my life. So when he turned uphill, I followed him and we moved fast, up through the dust and over the hilltop, and then down the other side, heading north.
I stopped at the top and looked south. Even through the rising swirls of battle haze, I could see that the whole Greek army was in flight. In the centre, where Artaphernes stood with his bodyguard against the Ephesians, the great Eagle of Persia shone like the sun and the Ephesians ran like frightened children.
I looked back over my shoulder and saw the Lydian cavalry moving forward.
I called a warning to Aristides and got back in my place. We trotted along together, down the old acropolis and out on to the plain, then around a farm pond.
Aristides shouted and we turned. There was a moment of confusion and then our shields locked – and the cavalry turned away, throwing spears.
Six times we turned and stood our ground. The last time, I’d had enough, and as they turned to run, I broke from the front of the phalanx and ran after them. They were contemptuous of us and the dust was high, and I caught my man before he’d even begun to ride away. My spear killed his horse, and then I put my point in his eyes as he lay under the animal. Other horsemen began to turn to come back, and that was their error. Aristides charged them, the whole Athenian phalanx changing directions like a school of fish, from prey to predator in a heartbeat. The Lydians wrestled to control their horses and we must have killed fifteen or twenty of them before they broke away.
The first Lydian I killed had gold on his sword strap, and Cleon helped me pull it over his head. Then I saw the sword, and it was a fine weapon – a long leaf-blade, thin near the hand and wide and sharp near the point. See – there it is on the wall. Take her down – that’s my raven’s talon. Her blade snapped on me later and I got her a new one. Same scabbard – long story there, she took some time to come back to me once, like an angry wife.
Touch that blade, honey. Fifty men’s lives fell across that edge. Aye, maybe more. That Lydian had a good sword and a good horse and later I heard that he was a good man – a friend of Heraclitus, more’s the pity, but Ares put him under my hand and I took him. He thought we were beaten and he and his mates died on our spears.
And then we got back in our ranks and scampered off.
We went ten stades at something like a run, and then we stopped. It was mid-afternoon, and the sun was still high. We drank water – we’d run clear and we were safe enough.
The Euboeans were weeping.
Eualcidas had fallen, and they had left his body.
I never heard how it happened. He must have gone down in the first moments of the fight against the Carians, because that’s when mistakes happen. And when we turned to run, no one was quite sure he’d been hit. The Euboeans took more casualties than we did, and perhaps all the men around him died, too.
But the shame of leaving his body to be spoiled was more than could be borne.
Aristides, for all his nobility, couldn’t understand what they were talking about. We’d lost two dozen men in the fight, and we were leaving them so that we could run for our ships. To Aristides, base as that was, abandoning the corpses was the price of saving his command, and he was never a man to put his own honour above the saving of his men – which is why we loved him.
But the Euboeans began to shout, and they were weeping, as I said.
‘Will the Medes accept a truce to bury the dead?’ Heraklides asked.
Aristides shook his head. ‘We’re rebels against the Great King,’ he said. ‘Artaphernes won’t accept a herald from us.’
Men started to look at me. I don’t know who started it – but soon a dozen heads were turned my way, and I knew what was expected. It’s the most unfair part of high reputation – once you choose to be a hero, you have no choice in the matter.
I reslung my new sword until I liked the way it hung, and hefted my borrowed spear. ‘I’ll go and fetch him, then,’ I said. ‘Shall I?’
I could see it all cross Aristides’ face. I wasn’t a citizen – I didn’t count against his numbers. My loss was – acceptable. And yet, he was a truly noble man.
He came over to me. He kept his voice low. ‘We all saw you,’ he said. He meant, we all saw you shatter the Carians. His eyes rested on mine. ‘Say the word, and I will forbid your going.’ He meant, if I wanted out, he’d provide me with an excuse. That, my fine young friends, is nobility.
Damn, he was a good man. A man who understood men like me. And remember, he stood in the front rank five or six times – not because he loved it, but because it was his duty. He was brave. Because he didn’t love it. Oh, no.
But I shook my head. ‘I’ll go,’ I said. ‘Give me two slaves to carry the body.’
Cleon volunteered his Italian, and the Euboeans pushed forward their hero’s Cretan boy. He was weeping.
I took a deep breath, searching for the power of combat and finding nothing. I didn’t even want to walk to the ships, much less turn and go back ten stades. I had no plan and no idea what I was up against.
But I knew my role already – Eualcidas had taught me. So I shrugged as if it was nothing. ‘I’ll meet you at the ships,’ I said, trying to sound reassuring, grand and noble.
I had taken three paces when Aristides caught me and embraced me. Our breastplates grated together, his bronze
thorax
and my scales. And then Herk came up.
‘Go straight to the river,’ he said.
‘How?’ I asked. I wasn’t really listening – I was trying to get my head around what I’d just said I would do.
He pushed an arm out and pointed down the long slope to the distant river. ‘I’ll set my rowers moving as soon as I get to the beach,’ he said quickly. ‘Go south with the body. I’ll come to you. I swear it by the gods.’
Suddenly, it didn’t seem so bad. It was still stupid and impossible – but Herk was going to come and rescue me. ‘You’re a fine man,’ I said. ‘No matter what I say about you when your back is turned.’
He laughed – we all laughed, the way heroes are supposed to laugh. And then I turned to the slaves. ‘Let’s go,’ I said.
And we were off.
The first thing I did was to tell the slaves that they were free as soon as we got that body to the ships. That changed their demeanour. Desperate mission, impossible odds – but if freedom was the reward, they were game. Heh – I was a slave, thugater. I know the rules.
We walked forward. I wasn’t in a hurry – in as much as I had a plan, my plan was to lie low until dark and then go for the corpse. We made it back to the farm pond, and there were Lydian slaves burying the men we’d killed. We went around a thicket, well to the north of the corpses, and then we stopped in a copse of olive trees and had something to eat and drank some of the wine and water that the three of us carried – which, to be honest, was a fair amount. By now, I was afraid – afraid to turn around and quit, and afraid to go down to the battlefield.
The two slaves – Idomeneus and Lekthes – were not afraid. Idomeneus had been Eualcidas’s bed-warmer, a beautiful boy with kohl on his eyelashes, but the muscles in his arms were like ropes, and he had wept for his master until the kohl ran down his face. He looked like a fury, or a mourner at a funeral.
Lekthes was a different kind of boy, short and squat and just growing into heavy muscle, with a thick neck and a pug nose. He was brave enough to give me lip when I told him to polish my armour, so I had some faith in him.
I was a famous warrior, and a hero. They believed in me, and I could see it in them, which made me braver. Sad, but true. I drank in their admiration, and when I’d had enough food and enough wine, we walked down into the darkening fields where vultures already ripped at the corpses.
The little acropolis was easy to find, and the Carians hadn’t disturbed the bodies. They lay where they had fallen.
And then the task began. I’d expected – Hades, I don’t know what I expected, but I think I’d wanted to fight fifty Persians and take the body by force. Instead, the three of us moved from ruined body to ruined body, turning each over to look at the man.
Don’t ever go on a darkening battlefield.
Most of the bodies were already stripped. Imagine – we were forty stades from Ephesus, no one had come to bury the dead, but human greed was enough that every peasant in the area was hurrying to the battlefield to strip finger rings. Only the gold was gone – most men were still in armour, although here and there a good helmet was missing.
After we combed the hill once, I realized that I was looking for a bareheaded man. The human vultures would have stripped his high-winged helmet.
My hands were foul with old blood and ordure – most men soil themselves in death, and many spear wounds open a man’s entrails anyway. I stopped to throw up, drank some wine and held my hands away from my face because they stank. And then I went back up the hill. This time, I tried to think like a philosopher. I found my own place on the battlefield, and then I reasoned where Eualcidas should have been, at the right-most point of his line. And then I walked down the hill,
being
Eualcidas in the half-dark.
I found him just as Idomeneus whistled. I had left the Cretan boy at the hill crest because he was weeping and because I’d decided that we needed a lookout. His whistle froze me, my hand on Eualcidas’s shoulder. He was dead, with a clean stab through his throat-boll that had almost decapitated him.
Lekthe was a tough bastard, and he was right by me. ‘Cavalry,’ he said.
I glanced down at them. They were behind us, half a stade away. ‘Strip him and put him on a stretcher,’ I said. ‘Use his cloak and some spears.’
He nodded.
I picked up a pair of spears – they were everywhere – and went uphill until I reached the Cretan kid. ‘Go and help Lekthe,’ I said.
‘You – found him?’ he asked.
I pushed him down the hill. Then I crouched by a rock – or perhaps the foundation stone of the old temple – and watched the Lydians. They weren’t interested in me.
From the height of the hill, I could see a hundred other parties gathering wounded, and my hopes rose immediately. There were wounded men all over the field, of course. Why hadn’t I thought of that?
In fact, the worst mistake I’d made was to come armoured and armed. Because the winners, as soon as the fighting ends, shed their kit and go and find their friends. Of course they do.
But I was not abandoning my arms. So I went down the hill and rooted among the dead men until I found one with his
himation
strapped inside his shield to pad his shoulder – older men do it – and I used the cloak to cover me. By then the slaves had the body on a couple of spears. I used one of my spears as a walking staff and discarded the other, and I made Lekthe carry my aspis on his back while Idomeneus carried his master’s shield – a scorpion – on his own back.
And then, like a funereal procession, we walked down off the old acropolis and into the valley, heading for the river. I felt clever, brave and more than a little godlike.
Heh. The gods can smell hubris a stade away.
Any of you young people ever been on a corpse field? Eh?
I’ll take that as a no.
It is not quiet. We say ‘as quiet as the grave’, and it may be that once the soul has flown out of the mouth and gone down with the other shades, the grave is quiet, but a battlefield is a noisy place. The animals come to feast, the crows and ravens fight over the tastiest morsels, and men scream their last pain or defiance to the gods, until they cannot scream, and then they cough and pant and rattle.
Once dark falls, it is the worst place you can imagine.
May the gods preserve you from ever having to visit one in the dark or pass your last hours there, although I always expected it for myself. It unmans me just to think of it. Better a clean death in the heat of battle, so that the soul goes burning with the pure fire of strife to the logos, than the foul death amidst the carrion-eaters.
And women and children who have to go searching among the corpses for a father, a lover, a brother, a husband – by Hades, that is a cursed way to see a man for the last time, with the ravens picking at his eyes.
We walked down from the hill that the Athenians and Eretrians had held, and darkness fell as we made our way among the corpses. I didn’t know it, but it wasn’t so bad there, because the worst of the kills happen after one side runs – and we didn’t run, and neither did the Carians, so there were not as many dead as there might have been.
It was down in the valley that the corpses became thick, and they were all Greek. Hades, but they were thick, honey. The darkness hid the worst of it, except for the sounds, but I still had to stop and retch when I saw a dog rooting inside the chest cavity of a man and his eyes seemed to move. The slaves saw and dropped the body. When I had finished retching I put my spear in the man’s throat to make sure.