Killer Of Men Part 27

'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 n.o.ble 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 n.o.bility.

d.a.m.n, 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 s.h.i.+ps, 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 s.h.i.+ps,' I said, trying to sound rea.s.suring, grand and n.o.ble.

I had taken three paces when Aristides caught me and embraced me. Our breastplates grated together, his bronze thorax thorax and my scales. And then Herk came up. 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 G.o.ds.'

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 s.h.i.+ps. 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 being Eualcidas in the half-dark. 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d, 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 himation strapped inside his s.h.i.+eld 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 s.h.i.+eld a scorpion on his own back. strapped inside his s.h.i.+eld 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 s.h.i.+eld 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 G.o.dlike.

Heh. The G.o.ds 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 G.o.ds, 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 G.o.ds preserve you from ever having to visit one in the dark or pa.s.s 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.

I think the slaves wanted to run away.

I didn't blame them, but I wiped the spear and then myself. 'If you won't carry him to the s.h.i.+ps, I'll run you down and add you to the pile of bodies,' I said.

Neither of them met my eye. They picked up the spear-poles and we started off again, stumbling and cursing.

There were pinpoints of light in the dark, most of them in a clump to the west. We made to skirt around them, and ran into our first patrol.

I had a.s.sumed that the battlefield was empty except for scavengers and mourners, but of course the Persians, who organized everything in their lives, had patrols to keep the scavengers from the corpses of their own slain until the sun should rise again. I heard them in time, and the three of us lay flat. There was some moonlight, just enough to make the whole scene hazy and hard to see, like a foul dream. I lay there, the pale circle of my face hidden in my cloak, and listened.

All I could hear was a dying man at my side grunting. He tried to grab my elbow.

'Please?' he managed. The poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d had lain there for six hours or more. No water. I could smell his guts.

I elbowed him. Now I could hear footsteps.

'He-eh? He-eh?' the dying man said. And little grunts and mewls, like those a toddler makes.

'Camel-f.u.c.kers!' a Persian voice said. They were close close. 'Come to loot our dead, the cowards. Effeminate boy-f.u.c.kers! I hate the Greeks. Run from a battle and come back to steal from the dead!'

The man ranted on and on, as men do after battles. I didn't know his voice.

'Shush, brother,' another voice said. 'Shush. Ahriman walks the dark. No man should curse here.'

'Heh-eh,' the dying man cried. He gave a convulsive jerk.

'What was that?' the first Persian said.

'Men take a long time to die. Come, brother. Keep walking. If I stop, I will have to start getting water for these poor b.a.s.t.a.r.ds.' The second Persian sounded familiar. Was he someone I knew?

It didn't matter, because even Cyrus and Pharnakes would kill me if they took me, or so I thought.

'Boy-f.u.c.kers,' the man who was angry spat, and they walked off. I heard him stumble on a corpse, and he fell. 'Ah!' he cried. 'I am foul with the juices of his body.' His voice shook. 'I am unclean!'

The second Persian spent half the night rea.s.suring him. He was a good man, that one. While he talked to his frightened brother, he emptied his canteen into two wounded men, and then he started killing them. I heard him, and though it sounds foul, I knew that he was no murdering fury, but a bringer of peace.

'Eh-eh-eh . . .' said the dying man at my elbow.

I looked at him, and he was younger than me and kalos kalos, even at the point of death, with big, beautiful eyes that wanted to know how his world had turned to s.h.i.+t. His skin, where it was not smeared with sweat and puke, was smooth and lovely. He was somebody's son.

I drew my short dagger, really my eating knife, from under my scale s.h.i.+rt where I keep it, and I put my lips by his ear.

'Say goodnight,' I said. I tried to sound like Pater when he put me to bed. 'Say goodnight, laddy.'

'G'night,' he managed. Like a child, the poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d. Go to Elysium with the thought of home Go to Elysium with the thought of home, I prayed, and put the point of my eating knife into his brain.

Give me some f.u.c.king wine.

Oh, war is glorious, thugater.

I dream of him. I never saw his face in the dark, you see. He could have been anyone. Any one of hundreds of men I've put down myself. Battlefields, sieges, duels, s.h.i.+p fights all leave that wastage of dead and near dead, and every one of them was a man man, with all of a man's life, before the iron or the bronze ripped the shade from him.

It's funny. I have killed so many men, but that one comes back to me in the dark, and then I drink more and try to forget.

Here, fill it.

The Persians lingered and lingered, but at last the older one got his brother to walk away into the dark, and I picked myself up, found the two slaves and we headed west to avoid more Persian patrols.

West brought the sound of mourning. Here the Persians and the Lydians had reaped the Ionians like weeds at the edge of a field, cutting them down from behind as they fled. Now local women were out looking for their men, and fathers and children, with torches. The Persians didn't disturb them, and they thought we were more of the same which we were, or close enough.

As the moon climbed, we could see the curved line of corpses like sea-wrack on a beach, and men and women desperately turning them, pus.h.i.+ng torches down to look into a face. Grim work.

I knew Herac.l.i.tus by his voice. He was talking to a boy and the boy was weeping by his side. I couldn't help myself. I walked up to him in the dark and he raised his torch.

'Doru!' he said. 'You live!'

I threw my arms around him. I wept. I was no different from the younger Persian I was unmanned by my reaction to the fight and then to the battlefield.

He let me cry for as long as my heart beat a hundred times no longer. 'You are searching for him too?' he asked.

'I I came for Eualcidas. Of Euboea.' My voice shook. 'Searching for who?'

Herac.l.i.tus nodded. He had a torch and it made his face look like a statue's. His eyes were pools of darkness. 'Hipponax fell here, trying to keep the line from breaking,' he said.

'Ah.' I choked. I remember that suddenly I couldn't breathe. The weeping boy was Kylix, the slave. 'Is Briseis here?' I asked.

'Don't be a fool,' Herac.l.i.tus said. 'News won't even be in the city yet.' More softly, he asked, 'Will you help me find him?'

'Put the body down and rest,' I said to the slaves. 'These are friends.'

Lekthes came and touched my arm to get my attention. He pointed to the river, which was clear, just a stade away in the moonlight. 'We are close, master,' he said.

He didn't want to risk his soon-to-be-accomplished freedom, he meant.

'Stow it,' I growled. I came back to Herac.l.i.tus. 'You fought?' I asked. I had a hard time picturing him in the phalanx.

'Do I look like a slave?' he asked. 'Of course I fought.' He reached out and touched my sword. 'This is a bitter night for me, Doru. And for you I know.' His eyes were shadowed, but I knew he was looking over my shoulder. 'Help me find him,' he said quickly.

'Of course, master,' I said.

I found him in a matter of moments. I knew his bronze-studded sandals. I had put them on his feet often enough.

I sobbed to see that alone of the men at that part of the line, he lay with his face to the foe and he had a great wound in his side where a spear had gone in under his armpit where his rank-mate should have protected him. A Mede lay by his head, and Hipponax's spear point was stuck in the man's ribs.