Killer of Men (36 page)

The day went on and on, the sun rising hotter and hotter on us. The dogs flushed two pigs – and both evaded us, so that the men began to talk of nets. But the king would have nothing to do with them. I heard one voice, shriller and angrier, demanding nets, and I could see the resemblance. This was his son. He had enough spots to be a fawn.

The third pig that the hounds eventually flushed for us was a little bigger than a dog and not very dangerous. But she was smart enough to keep the dogs off her and fast enough to make us run to keep up, and before long, I was the only man still pacing the front coursers. Those men were all in top shape, but I’d been at war – and at an oar – all summer, and I was half their age. I ran up the mountain and I began to catch the dogs. It was so steep that I knew that if I stumbled I’d have to stop and climb – but for the moment, momentum and pride kept me going, and I could see the pig.

I had no idea about the etiquette of Cretan hunting and no desire to annoy the king. In any case, Lord Achilles had bandy legs and a broad chest and ran slowly, but he was strong as an ox and had the open friendliness that only big men seem to have. Despite his ugly body, men liked him. He was a powerful lord. And he was next behind me on the mountain – the others were way behind us. Slow he might have been – but he wasn’t to be stopped. And there I was, love-sick and fury-hounded, sprinting along beside the lead hound, wondering what Artemis would have me do.

The pig lost her nerve when she saw a stand of oak. We were well up the mountain and the ground was rough with stone. The oaks were scrubby things, nothing like the trees of Cithaeron, but I knew what she meant to do. I put on a burst of speed and threw one of my heavy spears – missing the pig, but turning her away from the trees and back towards the hunters.

She lacked the experience of hunting to know what to do. She turned and I stooped, picked up a jagged rock and threw it just beyond her. She turned again and the pack closed in on her.

Achilles came up with his officers and their lovers and there were ten spears in the pig within a few heartbeats. I got my spear wet in her blood out of habit. In some circles, a hunter who does not wet his spear is a coward, or not a man – different hunters have different habits.

Old Achilles – he seemed old to me, although he was ten years younger than I am today – took me by the shoulder. ‘Well done. You are a man of courtesy – like a warrior of the old times.’

Achilles’ eldest son – I had pegged him correctly – was introduced. He was just a year or two younger than me, a lout named Nearchos, all pimples and straggly black hair and youthful anger. He glowered at me and then turned away, affecting boredom.

‘My son is a rude fool. Nearchos! This foreigner is a
man
. He has killed in duels and in war. Look at him! No need to run a little pig down and kill it when he could share the kill with the rest of us – he doesn’t need that little glory for himself, see?’ Achilles squeezed my shoulder. ‘He needs a man to take him in hand and show him the path.’ He winked at me.

Nearchos looked at me from under his eyelashes and then blushed and turned his back, more like a maiden at the well than was quite right.

As we walked back to the hall, Idomeneus took my spears. ‘They want you to be his – well, his lover. His
erastes
. To teach him the ways of the world.’ Idomeneus batted his eyelashes at me.

I rolled my eyes. Boys will be boys, and what happens after a hunt is not for a maiden’s ears, but I’ve never understood the peculiar mating of boys and men that some practise, and even if I did appreciate such stuff, Nearchos’s face would not have launched a single scow, where Helen’s launched a thousand ships.

On the other hand, I was flattered to be treated as a hero in a foreign land. Back at the hall, the pig grew in size with every retelling, and my act of generosity was magnified to near legendary status.

Herk took me aside. ‘They love you,’ he said. ‘I thought they might. Will you stay?’

‘Do I have a choice?’ I asked.

Herk shrugged. ‘Don’t be a prick. I’m doing my best for you.’ And he was.

I shrugged. Nearchos was leaning against a pillar, whittling a stick with a pretty knife and looking at me when he thought I couldn’t see him.

‘I could live here for a season.’ I shrugged again. ‘But sooner or later, they’re going to know that my father was a bronze-smith. Not a noble.’

Herk tried to hide a smile as he saw how it was with Nearchos, and he turned his back on the boy. ‘Lord Achilles is as rich a man as Miltiades and he’s asked me twice if you might be interested in staying on as his boy’s war tutor. And to fight in his war band, of course.’ The big Athenian sighed. ‘It’s a soft life here. But you already have a name. What’s waiting for you at home? A farm? Farming is for fools. Stay here, and be rich. And when you leave here,
everyone
will think of you as an aristocrat. Crete is the most aristocratic place in Hellas. What in Tartarus does
home
have, by comparison?’

‘I’ll let them know who I am,’ I said, with a little too much youthful emphasis. ‘All right. I’ll stay.’

‘And Cleon’s right – see a priest.’ My friend raised an eyebrow.

‘Before the furies come for you.’

I looked at Nearchos. Then I looked back at Herk.

‘You don’t have to lie with him,’ he said. ‘Be unattainable. But teach him. You have a great deal to teach. You have a brain, lad – remember that sophist you took us all to see?’

‘Heraclitus?’ I asked.

‘That’s it. You have a formal education. You can teach.’ He pointed his chin at Lord Achilles, who was laughing with his leading men. ‘I’ll negotiate your price, if you like. And I can set it high – ten times what Miltiades would pay for a spearman.’

‘Very well,’ I said. And the knucklebones were cast. I was not going home.

Both Idomeneus and Lekthes chose to stay with me as my ‘men’. Old Herk wrote them into the contract like the wily Athenian he was, and so we all had bed and board and wages from Lord Achilles, and they became my sworn men in the Cretan way. Idomeneus was all for it – he was a peasant from down the coast and he understood the system better than I. In three weeks he’d gone from bed-warmer to warrior. He began to grow proud.

I had few friends on the ship, as I’ve said, but Cleon was one. We embraced, and I promised to visit him in Athens. He laughed. ‘I live in a house smaller than a grain-byre,’ he said. ‘But I’d love to see you. By Zeus and Hermes and all the gods, it is good to be going home, and here’s my hand and a prayer that I see you framed by my doors!’

Good man. Listen, honey – the Poet talks about heroes, but there’s never enough about the Cleons – good men who love their wives and their children but still stand their place in the battle line. He
hated
war. But he did it.

Then, richer and lighter, Heraklides and Cleon and their ship sailed away, and left me and my little entourage with the lords of Crete. And Cleon’s eagerness to be
home
rang in my ears.

In fact, Idomeneus, the scared boy of the battlefield, Eualcidas’s catamite, became my confidant and adviser. He knew the local words, he knew the laws and he understood the complex relations between lord and lord – so much more complicated than life in Boeotia, or so it seemed to me then. Now I understand that every man’s customs seem natural to him and alien to a foreigner.

When I discovered that Idomeneus and Lekthes were to fight in the line with me, I bought them simple arms and armour – good stuff from a local smith of godsent talent called Hephaestion, a fitting name for a smith. They had simple leather corslets and good bronze helmets in the local style, and it was my fancy to have us all carry Boeotian shields, to mark us as different.

You hardly ever see a Boeotian any more. Take mine down, thugater. Try that on your arm, young man. You see? The porpax runs the opposite way from what you might expect, eh? Long and narrow – and the cut-outs in the side are not for putting your spear through! Older men on Crete told me that those holes are for wearing the shield on your back in chariot combat – the holes make it easier on your back and elbows, or so I’m told.

I think it’s just because that’s the way a bull’s hide cuts. Those old Cretan noblemen never made a shield, and I’ve made quite a few.

But you can see that it is lighter than an aspis. Not as safe – thinner. And a man with a Boeotian shield has to be aggressive in his blocks – no messing around. You can stand behind an aspis and take blows, but with a Boeotian you have to get that forward edge out and in your opponent’s face.

Anyway, that was my whim. I was flattered by the attention of all these Cretan aristocrats, and the word of my killing the warrior Goras on the east coast had come to Gortyn.

I trained the two of them and Nearchos together. Nearchos had already received years of training, or what the Cretans called training, meaning that he was in top shape and could recite the
Iliad
. So we ran, and we hunted, and I began by teaching them the Pyrrhiche – the Boeotian war dance in armour that shows a man how to move his body, flex his hips, thrust low and high, and drills a group of men to move in unison. I drafted an old flute player from the hall and in two weeks they were able to do the dance. Men came and watched and laughed.

Lord Achilles watched one afternoon. Nearchos was surly, because he hated performing in front of people. I knew him a little by then and liked him a little better. There was a noble young man buried beneath the angst and the boyhood and the burning desire.

When we had completed the dance ten times, and all three of my students were stumbling with fatigue, Lord Achilles got up and nodded. ‘You give them grace. But how is it different from our dances?’

I had seen their dances. In Gortyn, when the ephebes dance, they dance with weapons and armour, but it is all show – postures meant to show a man’s muscles, to stretch him and prove the soundness of his legs. On Crete, they use the dances to pick the fittest – by which they mean the most beautiful.

It’s the same dance in Plataea, and yet utterly different. We dance for war, and our dance has all the feints, all the attacks, all the shield parries – and the first figure is the hardest, where men learn to rotate from one rank to another. On Crete, they never rotate ranks – the front-rank dancers are the most beautiful. I don’t know what they do when they get tired in combat.

‘If we are all trained the same way,’ I said, ‘we will all move together in combat.’ I shrugged, I think. ‘And he needs something different. This is different.’

Then I remembered something that Calchas had said. ‘And men are scared in combat,’ I added. ‘If they learn to block and thrust by rote, over and over, then they can do it even when terror and panic pull at their guts.’

Old Achilles had been in a fight or two. He nodded. ‘How many fights have you seen?’ he asked.

I thought for a minute. ‘Four field battles. Ten duels.’ That was an exaggeration, but not by much. ‘A skirmish or two,’ I added with modesty that was, in fact, the exact truth.
And some beatings and a murder
, I thought. I was just eighteen, and I’d seen more violence than any of the men in the lord’s hall.

After that day, there was less laughter when we danced, and other men came and asked to join in. They came self-consciously, with servants carrying their armour. I accepted them all, and I moved the dancing to the broad field with a rose garden behind it. The scent of roses coloured everything that summer, for me. We danced, and then I put a heavy paling in the ground with the help of some slaves and I taught my students to use their swords and spears on the paling, cutting at it, lunging at it, developing the fine control of the weapon that allows you to put your spear into a man’s throat or between his eyes, to feel how much thrust it takes to kill and how much is too little.

Winter came and we trained in the hall, we ran in a pack across the hills and we hunted deer. News came that Ephesus had fallen. According to a Cyprian merchant, when the Persian siege mound was even with the walls, Aristagoras filled his ships and sailed away, leaving the Ephesians to their fate. And the Ephesians had surrendered on terms.

I cried. I should have been there. I was wasting my life in a back-water, far from the woman I loved. It was a good life but dull, and I was beginning to get tired of avoiding Nearchos. I wasn’t home, I wasn’t with Briseis and I wasn’t – anyone.

The next spring, when the plants were in bud and all women were becoming equally attractive to me, I was saved by Heraklides, who arrived with a cargo and told me that Aristagoras was raising men and ships throughout Ionia to liberate Cyprus.

‘And his wife?’ I asked.

‘Medea come to life.’ Herk rolled his eyes. ‘He is a fool to marry a girl so young, and so intelligent. If only she was the strategos.’ He laughed and I went back to dreaming of my lost love.

In the autumn, as the wheat was coming in, Aristagoras came to Crete. He came with five ships and he toured the lords, asking for support – and receiving it. Cyprus was rich and the Cretans longed to have a piece of Cyprus. They had not been to war for many years, and every young man clamoured to go.