Killer of Men (48 page)

I felt a rush of memory. It wasn’t that I had hidden the memories, it was only that I hadn’t thought about them – I hope that makes sense, honey. Young people live in the moment. I had lived in the moment for eight years. Hidden, if you like. Men in stories rush home to avenge their fathers. I had been a slave. I didn’t want to go home.

Sometimes, in the silence of my slave cubicle at Hipponax’s house, or on my bed in Lord Achilles’ palace, I would think of home. Sometimes I would dream of ravens flying west, or I would see a raven and I would think of home – always a home with Pater and my brother. As if they were alive.

But they weren’t alive. They were dead. And I knew, as soon as I let myself think about it, that Simonalkes had killed my father. I could see him, turning away from the fighting line, the fucking coward, his sword red at the tip, and Pater falling. Stabbed from behind.

It is like the difference between hearing that your woman is sleeping with your friend and finding them together in your bed. Hermogenes was
there
. It was time to face the facts.

‘I was sold into slavery,’ I said, slowly. ‘I was at Ephesus, as a slave. For years.’

Hermogenes pursed his lips and fingered the scar on his forehead. ‘That would have been hard for you, I think,’ he said. There spoke a man who had been a slave.

‘It was hardest at first,’ I said, and I told him about the slave pens. More than I’ve told you, actually. He was born a slave, and in our family. He was never sold, nor bought.

‘That was – terrible,’ he said. ‘Zeus Soter – I never had to do any of that. Pater did, though. He’s told me the story, a dozen times – how he was taken, how he struggled and failed to escape, and how your father bought him.’ Hermogenes shrugged. ‘Simonalkes tried to re-enslave us, but old Epictetus stuck up for us. Thanks to him, Pater is a citizen now.’ ‘And you’ve been looking for me for three years?’ I asked.

He shrugged. ‘On and off, friend. I had to eat.’

‘What did you do?’ I asked.

He looked at the wine shop table. ‘Things,’ he said. ‘A little carpentry. Some gardening.’ He took a sip of wine. ‘Some theft.’

‘By the father of the gods,’ I said, ‘how did you come here?’

He flexed his shoulders and rubbed his scar again. ‘An Athenian magistrate gave me the choice: come here or have an ear cut off.’ He smiled. ‘Not a hard choice. And then, when I was waiting in a warehouse with a bunch of other lowlifes, I heard a man mention your name – he said we’d be fighting under Miltiades of Athens, and Cimon, and Arimnestos Doru. When I got here, Cimon took me for his crew. He said that you were a Plataean. It seemed too much to hope. But here we are.’

Cimon shook his head. ‘What a tale!’ He looked at me. ‘I take it this man is your friend, as he claimed to me.’

I nodded. ‘Absolutely.’

Cimon smiled. ‘I shouldn’t give him to you. For the things you shouted at Paramanos.’

I hung my head. ‘I was in the wrong,’ I said.

Cimon shrugged. ‘You know what I like about you, Arimnestos? That you can say it – just like that. “I was in the wrong.”’ He nodded. ‘Have your friend, and may your friendship always be blessed. You owe me an oarsman.’

‘I’ll see to it you get the best I have,’ I said. Having Hermogenes sitting by my side was like a drink of clean water on a hot day, for all that his news disturbed me.

‘I don’t need your best. He may be your friend, but he’s a scrawny sewer rat. Send me another and we’re quits.’ Cimon rose. His eyes grew serious. ‘This man Simonalkes really murdered your father, Doru?’

I nodded.

Cimon made a face. ‘You
have
to do something about that, don’t you?’ He shrugged. ‘Some day, some bastard – probably an outraged husband – will kill Pater. And then I’ll have to kill him, or the furies will haunt me.’

Suddenly, with the clarity of long-delayed realization, I understood the raven dreams. ‘Yes,’ I said.

Cimon nodded. ‘Pater will have a fit if you leave before the sailing season ends,’ he said.

He raised an eyebrow and left us alone.

The next day, I took Hermogenes for a sail with Paramanos, Stephanos, Lekthes and Idomeneus. Hermogenes already looked better, cleaner, wearing a new chiton and new sandals. I’d armed him and put silver in his purse. He was two finger’s breadths taller when he was clean and dressed. I hadn’t had a hypaspist since Idomeneus rose to warrior status, and Hermogenes took the job immediately. It made him laugh to dress so well – it was days before he stopped hiking his chiton to look at the purple stripe.

Paramanos wasn’t even angry. He just shrugged. ‘Angry men talk shit,’ he said with a smile. ‘I don’t need a picnic on the sand to make it better.’

‘You’ll want to be at this picnic,’ I said.

We had a fishing smack, a light craft, lovingly built, with a single mast. We took turns sailing it, racing along the Bosporus in a way that real fisherman would never risk their rigging or their boat. Hermogenes looked anxious and Stephanos shook his head at what he, a lifelong fisherman, saw as recklessness.

We sailed down the Bosporus for twenty stades and put in at a gravel beach well south of Kallipolis with an old shrine to a hero long forgotten. I sacrificed there sometimes. So I went ashore first, and Hermogenes and I sacrificed a lamb in thanksgiving, and then we all had potted hare and chicken and lamb and lots of wine.

After we ate, Paramanos sat back, poured a libation and we all shared a cup. Then he rose. ‘Well?’ he said. ‘Is this all by way of apology? Or because you’ve rediscovered your friend?’

I shook my head. ‘No. I know how to come at Ba’ales’ squadron.’

Paramanos nodded. ‘I thought as much. So – tell?’

Instead of telling, I pointed at the upturned hull of our smack.

Paramanos shook his head. ‘Brilliant,’ he said. He shook his head. ‘Why didn’t I think of it?’

That was that.

And it was that week, or the next week, that an ambassador came to us from the Carians, begging us to help them. I was invited to hear him, and Paramanos came with me. We lay on couches with Miltiades and his sons, Agios and Heraklides and the other captains, and the Carians asked us to help them with the Persians.

‘Anywhere we go, Ba’ales can drop troops behind us on the coast,’ the lead Carian insisted. ‘You have a great reputation as a lover of freedom. Men say you were the architect of the great victory at Amathus. Can’t you defeat Ba’ales?’

Miltiades shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘And I no longer serve the Ionians.’ He shrugged. ‘I’m a pirate, not a liberator.’

Callicrates, the leader of the embassy, shook his head. ‘We thought you might say such a thing.’ He handed over a gold-capped ivory scroll tube – the kind that the Great King used. ‘We captured this.’

Miltiades took it and unrolled the scroll. He read it by the light of the window, and then handed it to Cimon. Cimon read it with Heraklides and then Herk brought it to me, and Paramanos and I read it together.

It was a set of orders. The orders were to Ba’ales and his subordinates. They were ordered to raise twenty more ships and take Kallipolis and our other ports, and also the Thracian coast, including Aristagoras’s town.

‘The new ships are almost ready,’ Callicrates said.

Miltiades looked angry. ‘Why don’t I know any of this?’

‘There have been rumours,’ Cimon said. His brothers nodded.

‘Plenty of time to run for Athens,’ Miltiades said bitterly. ‘I can’t fight thirty ships.’

I looked at Paramanos. ‘My lord – if I may. I have a way you can knock Ba’ales out of the campaign – for this year, at least. Very little risk – at least, for you.’

Miltiades was leaning on his hands, staring out of the window. He turned. ‘Really?’ he asked. His voice said that he didn’t expect much. Like most arrogant men, Miltiades assumed he’d thought of everything.

‘In short, my lord, I propose that we catch Ba’ales at dawn and take or burn his ships while they are beached.’ I sat up on my couch.

‘No,’ Miltiades sounded like a bored schoolteacher talking to stupid children. ‘His coast-watchers will see us coming.’

I smiled. ‘Fishing boats,’ I said.

The story of the boat raid has been told so often that I won’t bore you with it. Every fisherman in these waters can tell you how we borrowed their boats, sailed down on the outflow from the Euxine, as the fishing fleet does every evening in summer, and caught Ba’ales on the beach at moonrise.

It was slaughter. We had just two hundred men, all fighters – the pick of Miltiades’ men. The only hard part was the last ten stades – when we could see their hulls, black in the moonlight, and we could see their fires, and for all we knew, they were lining the beach ready for us.

They were not. Someone gave the alarm when we were a stade out, but they never got formed. We raced the last stade, rowing our open boats as if they were triremes. My boat went a man’s length up the gravel beach when it hit, and I was over the side almost dry-shod, with Stephanos on one side of me and Hermogenes on the other.

Paramanos had one half of the men. Their mission was to secure our retreat by taking the likeliest of the enemy triremes and getting it afloat. My men were to set fire to the rest of the ships and kill as many oarsmen as we could.

Those ships burned like torches. We had fire pots rigged on poles, heavy crockery filled with coals, and we smashed them
inside
the enemy hulls as we went, two pots per hull. They were afire before the enemy recovered, and we were armoured men, formed at the edge of the firelight against the desperation of an unarmed rabble.

The sad truth is we burned too many – we could have taken more. Our two hundred men broke the Phoenicians. Most men fight badly when surprised, and they were no different. Ba’ales died in the first attack, although we didn’t know it. I hardly fought – I was too busy giving orders.

By Athena Nike, we drove them! Where they were brave, we killed them, and where they ran, we reaped them. Hah! That was a victory.

When it became clear that we were masters of the field, we managed to beat out the fires in one of the smallest of the enemy ships still on the beach, and we turned it over in the water, doused the embers and got it afloat too. So we managed to capture two of their dozen hulls, while the rest burned to their keels, and we got away with ten dead and as many wounded. Only Ares knows how many of their oarsmen and marines we left face down on the sand. We rowed, tired but happy, back up the Bosporus, towing the fishing boats in long lines behind us.

It sounds wonderful that way, doesn’t it? That’s the way a proper singer tells a battle, without mentioning that the ten dead men were dead, and their children were fatherless, their mothers widows, their lives over, perhaps for ever, because Miltiades chose to remain master of the Chersonese. Eh?

And another thing, though it shames me to tell it. I don’t always remember men’s names. The men who fell there on the beach? Making my reputation and saving Miltiades? I can’t remember them. The sad truth, honey, is that some time that summer I stopped learning their names. They died in raids, in little ship fights and of fevers. Men died every week. They came out from Athens, lower-class men with nothing to lose, and most of them brought their deaths with them. Some were too weak. Some never learned to handle their weapons.

We were pirates, thugater. I can coat it in a glaze of honey, set it in epic verse, but we were hard men who lived a hard life, and it wasn’t worth my time to learn the new men’s names until they’d survived for a while.

Don’t mind me. I philosophize.

At any rate, the next morning the Carians ambushed Daurises’ columns as he tried to push into the mountains west of the Temple of Zeus of the Army at Labraunda in Caria, and destroyed them, killing Daurises and quite a number of Persians – the first real victory of the whole war. The news went through the Ionians like a bolt from Zeus, and sacrifices appeared on Ares’ altars from Miletus to Crete.

I didn’t know it at the time, but Pharnakes, who had been my friend, and with whom I had twice crossed swords, died at Labraunda in the ambush.

In the aftermath of these two small victories, we heard that Darius had lost all patience with the revolt, and with Greeks in general. He ordered his satraps to prepare a major armament for the reduction of the Chersonese, and he bragged that he would see Athens destroyed.

That didn’t please the democrats in Athens, who were aware that Miltiades was responsible for Darius’s anger. But that’s not part of my story – just a comment.

As summer gave way to autumn, Miltiades received word from various sources about Darius’s preparations. He had ordered fifty ships to be levied from the Syrian towns, and the satrap of Phrygia was to aid Artaphernes in raising an army to destroy Caria and retake Aeolis.

We lay back on our couches and laughed, because that would all happen next summer. There was only six weeks left in the sailing season.

Miltiades toasted me in good Chian wine. ‘One stroke,’ he said, ‘and I am once again master in my own house. You are dear to me, Plataean.’

I frowned. ‘Next summer, Darius will come with a vast army.’

Miltiades would not be sober. ‘For all your heroism,’ he said, ‘you have a great deal to learn about fighting the Medes.’ He looked at Cimon.

Cimon laughed and spoke up. ‘Other provinces will revolt this winter,’ he said.

Miltiades nodded. ‘You think we hit Naucratis for pure profit?’ he asked me. I could see Paramanos grinning. I
had
thought we went there for pure profit.

‘Yes,’ I said.

Miltiades nodded. ‘Not to be spurned, profits. But when we took their ships, we showed the Greek merchants and the Aegyptian priests that their Persian overlords couldn’t defend them. And when it appears that we are winning, they will evict their garrisons as they did in my father’s time, and Darius will have to bend all his will to Aegypt. And then we will have lovely times!’ He laughed. The whole Greek world was speaking of our coup on the beach south of Kallipolis, and Miltiades’ name was on every man’s lips in Athens, and all was right in the world.

It was a good dream, but we had underestimated Darius, and we had forgotten those twenty ships that were on their way to reinforce Ba’ales.