Killer of Men (11 page)

That’s when I learned that Calchas had come into my body when I burned his corpse, because when they fled, I killed another. I liked it. I cocked back my arm and threw my spear into the back of a fleeing slave
and I liked it
.

Then I hobbled forward and retrieved my javelins.

Behind me, the left-most Athenians and the right-most Plataeans were cheering. They were cheering me. It went to my head like unwatered wine.

The other boys came back fast enough. They weren’t cowards. They just hadn’t understood the game.

We still didn’t understand. Callicles slapped my back and we ran forward together. I tried to angle across the Spartan front, because I knew we’d be safer on the flank, but I was slowed by my shin.

When I looked up, the Spartans terrified me. It’s not like being in the phalanx, out there in the middle between the armies. And the Spartans – they all look the same, with matching shields of bronze, like the richest Athenians, and with almost identical helmets. I actually wondered who made all those helmets. They looked very fine. And they scared me.

But I couldn’t flinch now. Although a curious reaction hit me – I still remember it. I felt cold as I hobbled forward and I began to shake. Then the other boys began to throw. We were too far away and Callicles started to yell like a real officer, pushing them forward. He turned his back on the Spartans and yelled at us to come on, come on, throw from closer.

I was near him when I saw the Spartan file-leader call an order and four hoplites burst out of the front of the shield wall. They came so fast, they were like javelins themselves. They were all athletes in high training, of course, not boys. I knew from the first long leg kicking that they were faster than I was when I wasn’t injured. There were only four of them against thirty of us.

Callicles died first. The fastest Spartan singled him out. I remember that the Spartan had a smile on his face under the helmet. I screamed at Callicles to run, but the fool stood his ground and threw my second-best spear, and the Spartan ducked his head and it passed him. He never even slowed, and his long
doru
went into Callicles above the groin and drove out of his back like some wicked growth, and then there was an explosion of blood, front and back. I’d seen it a hundred times hunting. Callicles was a dead boy.

All four of them killed a boy, like farmers cutting weeds. The leader killed a second boy next to Hermogenes.

Hermogenes fell to the ground without being touched, and then used his javelin to trip the lead Spartan. He went down in a clatter of armour, but he was up in less time than it takes to tell the sentence. Yet he was off balance and he was using his shield hand to push himself off the ground. Calchas had taught me better than that.

It was my worst throw of the day. I was terrified and elated at the same time, and my Deer Killer went into his left arm behind his shield, pinning the arm against the shield back. And he couldn’t get it out.

The others stopped to help him, because he was bellowing, and
then
Hermogenes grabbed me and helped me run.

By all the gods, my thugater – I thought those were my last moments, and when we were clear of the Spartans, I vowed that I would never, ever put my body in front of the phalanx again. I vowed it like a drunkard vowing not to drink.

Hermogenes and I got clear of the right flank. We had no idea where the other boys were. Then we lay down in the grass and heaved. Ares! We were alive. Wait until you bear a child, honey – you’ll feel the same rush of
eudaimonia
unless Artemis comes for you. Avert!

But when we looked up, the Spartans were charging.

They came forward to the music of pipes. And all the giants going to war with Father Zeus couldn’t have looked more dangerous or noble.

The rest of the Peloponnesians hesitated, and the Athenians came forward cautiously, but they came on, and the Plataeans weren’t cowards. They went forward into the Spartans.

The two lines hit each other like – well, like two phalanxes coming together. Imagine every cook in this town with every bronze kettle and a wooden spoon flailing away at it. Imagine every man bellowing with all his might. That is the sound of the storm of bronze, the battle line.

Hermogenes and I watched from the safety of the far right. And we saw what happened when the Spartiates hit our fathers.

They reaped them like wheat, that’s what happened.

What made the reputation of Plataea was not that our men were great fighters – at least, not that day. What forged our reputation for ever was that our men wouldn’t run. But Hermogenes and I watched men die. It was horrible – and awe-inspiring. The two blocks of spearmen crashed into each other at the same speed, and not a man flinched. Spartans tell me that they remember that day well – because so few foes withstand the impact, yet the men of Plataea slammed in, aspis to aspis. And then the killing started.

We watched as the helmet plumes in the front rank went down. It took only seconds and it seemed as if the whole front rank was gone. And then the Plataeans gave ground – grudgingly – but they lost ten steps.

I think it was Pater who stopped it from being a rout. Pater gave ground, but Bion says he killed a man – a spear thrust to the throat against a Spartiate file-leader. Then he and Bion pushed into the gap and Bion says they each took a man down. No one cares in the heat of a fight whether you kill your man as long as you put him down.

In that little eddy of the overall whirlpool of Plataean defeat, the Spartans hesitated. How often did men push through their front rank? I think it was Pater. I could see the plume on his helmet when the others, like Myron’s, were gone. And then the file-closers planted their feet and pushed at the back of the Plataean lines, and suddenly the Plataeans weren’t moving back – they were standing firm.

But some of the Spartans had broken through the front ranks, where men were capable and expected to fight. Soon they were pounding the rear ranks to ruin, killing like the machines that they were.

A few men broke from the rear of our phalanx and ran – and Simon must have been one of them. But elsewhere, our neighbours closed their files and shocked the Spartans who’d broken their ranks, crushing them like insects, stabbing them front and rear. There’s a reason why breaking ranks is punishable by law, and a reason why veterans call it foolish. The Spartans thought that we’d break – but we didn’t, and their young men died.

Who knows how long the men of Plataea would have held the Spartans? Another fifty heartbeats, perhaps. Perhaps less. The Spartans were going to win. The miracle of Ares is that our men stood their ground at all. They held for the time a goat takes to birth a kid – the time it takes a smith to make a sheet into a bowl with a few quick blows of skill.

But the Peloponnesians didn’t know any of this. What they saw was that the Athenians outnumbered them, and that their precious masters were being held up by a bunch of farmers from Boeotia.

The allies broke like songbirds faced with an eagle. They broke before the Athenians even hit them. They ran before the spears crossed, and not one of them stood. The Spartan king cursed, no doubt, and then backed his phalanx away, step by step. Unbeaten. Virtually victorious. But they backed away, and the Plataeans had
just barely
clung to their formation. From where we stood, Hermogenes and I knew that more men had started to flee from the back of our deep block. But enough stood to hold on.

Just barely.

Plataea was never the same.

No one cheered.

I’ve been on a hundred fields, honey. I’ve won against the odds and seen black defeat, but that’s the only time I’ve seen men so shattered
by victory
that they couldn’t cheer. Nor did they pursue. The men of Plataea shifted and recovered their ranks, because they were good men, and then they stood, silent, awed by their own success. Then some of the fallen began to stand up – Myron got to his feet, bleeding from a thigh, the red coming in little spurts where something big had been cut.

Let me tell you how it is in the line, honey. When you go down – and you can fall just because you lose your balance – why, then you won’t ever get up in that fight. Against honourable men, if you stay down and pull your shield over your body, no one will kill you just for sport. Maybe they will strip your armour if they win, but no one will kill you. You hope.

Anyway, Myron stood and began to sing. He sang the ‘Ravens of Apollo’ from the Daidala and all the voices of Plataea took it up, boys and men. We all knew it. It was an odd song for a battlefield – the song men sing while they wait for the ravens to pick us a tree to make the statue of the fake bride. Who knows why Myron chose that song?

Across the field, the Athenians were slowing. They’d never reached the Peloponnesians, and now, ranks untouched, they were coming to a halt and heads were turning to look at us.

Just two stades away, the Spartans halted in perfect order, covering their camp.

The Plataeans kept singing.

Then Cleomenes made a mistake. He didn’t trust the Thebans, and his Peleponnesian allies were running all the way back to their homes. And the Plataean farmers were singing as if they could stop the Spartans every day, for ever. That song had more effect on the battle than Pater’s stand, honey. That song was defiance of a different sort. Whether it was true or not, the ‘Ravens of Apollo’ told Cleomenes that there were men opposing him who would not flinch if he came on again. And if we held him for a hundred heartbeats, then all the hoplites in Attica would be in his flank.

Cleomenes sent a herald. He requested a truce to collect his dead.

By our law of war, this ended the battle and allowed the defeated free passage home. And it meant that, whatever the Thebans might do, the Spartans were done.

What changed our world was that Cleomones sent the herald to
us
rather than to the Athenians. That was respect. They knew they were the better men, and men who are better are never petty. They respect accomplishment, and they respected that we
tried
.

So their herald came and he walked towards Pater. Pater looked around, but the archon was dead and Myron, who had started the song, was down again – sitting on a rock, supported by his sons. Pater had two wounds on his sword arm; I had his helmet under my arm and he was pouring his canteen over his head.

‘Hey!’ Bion called. ‘Hey – look sharp, Technes! The herald is coming.’

Pater looked up, and there was the Spartan, resplendent in his scarlet cloak, with a heavy bronze staff to show his status. He bowed.

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.