The Great King (13 page)

Of course, most men were just waking up.

At any rate, the good mood didn’t leave me all day. I lay on the bank of the stadium where the town of Elis now maintains tall grass banks for the spectators – so much more comfortable than wooden stands, or stone benches. I watched some boys wrestle, and then Harpagos and Sekla nudged me because they saw horses, and we gave our spots in the stadium to a group of Corinthians who were grateful to us and we walked down to the hippodrome, where we watched horses trot around and around. The trainers eyed each other, and none of the horses ran full tilt. It was much the same with the men – they watched each other, and tried to have bursts of speed without the others seeing.

By two days before the sacrifices to open the games, almost all the competitors knew each other like wicked brothers, and they had clear ideas of who was fastest, strongest, most dangerous. In sports like pankration, it often happened that most of the competitors would drop out, leaving only three or four remaining. Why get badly injured when you know that you can’t take that big bruiser from Megara?

A few of the boxers sparred a little, and, as I say, a few of the young wrestlers, but most of the men and boys simply lifted weights, drew bows, and ran. They didn’t want to match themselves against each other until the great day.

That afternoon, as it began to cool, I saw the chariot teams.

You may recall – if you’ve been listening – that I know how to drive a chariot. I’m not good at it – I’m far too large and I don’t really love horses. But when I was a new-caught slave in Ephesus, I was trained by top men to drive a team, two-horse or four-. I don’t know enough to win a race, but I know enough to judge a team, and this was a superb team.

That year, there were six teams. The Aeginians came out first that day, and many men cheered. Their horses were all white, matched with manes that stood up like the crests on men’s helmets. They looked like Apollo’s horses, and every man in the crowd thought the same. I’m no fan of Aegina, but I cheered those horses.

Then came the team of my friend Gelon of Syracusa. His team, as if in deliberate competition, was all black, and they were the largest, longest-legged beasts I think I have ever seen. I understood later that they were Persian horses, purchased by an ambassador, and they stood a fist taller than any other horse in the race, black as Hades. I suspected, while looking at them, that they were the most expensive team.

The third team was Athenian. It was a fine team of mixed horses – a dark chestnut with black mane and tail and three unmatched bays. They were the least remarkable looking of all the teams. They looked dowdy by comparison with Gelon’s team.

Of course, no wreath of laurel is awarded for the ‘best-looking team’.

The Corinthian team was driven by a black man – that alone was worthy of comment – and their horses were matched bays with their manes carefully dyed red. Perhaps most noteworthy, their African charioteer let them run – and they ran like a summer storm. He took one pole—

Have you never seen a chariot race?

They run on the same kind of course where men run. One stade, with two posts. You have to drive down the course and then turn at the post and come back. Not a round course – that would, apparently, be too easy. Not an oval. A straight track, a terrible turn, and a straight back – twenty-seven times. It is not a short race. In fact, the chariot race for four horses is the longest race at the Olympics, and horses have been known to die.

At any rate, the African took the turn on one wheel, and his offside chariot rail brushed the pole and he didn’t even look at it. He was . . .

Damned good. The Corinthians looked confident, and had that nice mix of showy and competent that suggests a winner.

The fifth team out of the pens was the Rhodian team from the islands, and they were too small and, frankly, looked like they needed to be fed. Sea trips can be very hard on horses, and these horses had seen better days. They were all piebald black and white, and they were a fist smaller than all the other horses.

And finally, while I was stretching and considering a cup of watered wine, the Spartan team came out.

They were good horses – unmatched, but well muscled, with square heads and big chests. I remember saying to Harpagos, who was with me, that they looked like Spartans – heavily muscled and red.

They made quite a stir. At first, I thought it was just because of all the bureaucratic uproar about entering them, but the man driving the Spartan team was, in fact, their owner, Polypeithes, a Spartan citizen. This hardly ever happened. Drivers were mostly professionals – freedmen or even slaves. The driver wasn’t considered to be the competitor, in chariot racing – it was the owner who was the competitor. But most owners – the super-rich – didn’t bother to get dusty.

This Spartan gentleman seemed to feel differently.

He drove his own chariot, and he drove well.

I rolled over to Harpagos and pointed.

He shrugged and handed me the wine.

‘Watch the African driver,’ I said.

Harpagos nodded, and motioned to Moire, who was with us. He nodded.

The African driver only watched the Spartans, and mostly he watched the Spartan driver. And when the Spartans were halfway down the track on the far side, the African cracked his little hand whip, and his team leaped – I swear it – from a high trot to a gallop, and tore down the track going the other way.

The Spartan had just let his horses go, and they were at full gallop as the Corinthian team thundered down the course in the opposite direction.

The African was testing the speed of the Spartan team in an indirect manner.

The two teams shot past each other, a chariot wheel apart. The Spartan raised his whip in salute, and the African matched it.

We roared. I’d say there were three thousand men in the stadium and we’d seen a great thing. It went by in a second, but it was great.

The Spartan team thundered to the post and so did the Corinthian.

The African leaned a little, just as he had before, and put his chariot up on one wheel, and it made the turn with all four horses leaning so hard you’d have thought that they were running sideways. The spectators had to look back and forth to see both ends of the stadium – the Spartan was farther from the post and his horses didn’t lean as close. The Corinthian team was around while the Spartans were still slowing to make the tight turn, and the African reined in, sparing his horses. He knew what he wanted to know.

The Spartan came through the turn and he allowed his team to slow, aware that he’d been the slower of the two. But he didn’t show any temper. He merely reined in his horses and saluted the crowd and trotted around the track a few times. I saw Leonidas with half a hundred Spartans sitting together, like a phalanx – and I saw Gorgo sitting with her knees drawn up while a helot held an umbrella over her head against the sun. Polypeithes saluted Leonidas, and then, as he drove down the course, he rolled to a stop by Gorgo. She was sitting just off the course, in technical obedience to the prohibition about women that wasn’t really enforced anyway, but Spartans are often sticklers for religious observance.

She rose, the helot scurrying to keep up with her, and walked over to the chariot, and had a quick chat with Polypeithes. He bowed, and drove off. She shrugged and tossed a comment to her slave, who laughed.

I liked her instantly. Any man or woman who has laughing slaves is probably favoured of the gods. Trust me, thugater, I’ve been a slave.

That night we had another fine feast. Our food was already running short, and I was told there was nothing to hunt for ten miles – so my ill-got Illyrian gold went to buy mutton and kid. The farmers of Elis must be the richest shepherds in the aspis of the world.

That’s not really what this story is about. But old men like to complain.

At any rate, I was the host, and I had half the famous men in Greece at my fire that night, and it was a delight – Polypeithes the owner and charioteer chatting with Brasidas, and Narses, the Corinthian charioteer, chatting with Ka. We had a dozen pankrationists with an admiring audience of amateurs listening to their every word, and for an hour we had two of the finest poets and their musicians singing comic elegies to non-existent athletes. Simonides of Ceos, whose verses I had always admired, was in sometimes friendly competition with my friend Aeschylus of Athens, and the two of them mocked each other – and everyone else – as the wine flowed.

It was a good night.

I fell asleep sober, and woke just as the first rosy fingers of dawn touched the sky far to the east. I remember – and the whole history of the Long War probably pivots on this moment – I remember that I had a desperate urge to piss. So, cursing the chill of dawn, I threw off my cloaks and rose from my warm bed and, disdaining even sandals, pushed out of my little tent and went to the latrine.

Of course, to reach the latrine, I’d have to traverse about half of our camp, and I’m sure I’d have set a bad example, except that other men were just rising, and I didn’t want to be
seen
to disobey my own strictures.

I used the carefully dug trench and straightened my clothes and went back across the camp, still determined to see whether there was any warmth to be discovered deep in my cloak, when I saw . . . Well, I shan’t go into much detail, but I saw Gaia and Sekla, doing what men and women will do in the first light of dawn.

That was the end of sleep. Or perhaps it was the will of the gods that I wander out of our camp. But a glimpse of a couple making love – the expression on her face – and I was suddenly desolate. It wasn’t that I desired Gaia.

It was that I desired not to be alone.

I think I probably groaned aloud, like some tormented soul in Homer. And then, embarrassed lest they had heard me, I ran.

And having started to run, running a good distance in the dawn seemed as logical a pursuit as any. I think I decided to run off my woes and start the day with good exercise. I pulled my chiton over my head and tossed it into my tent and ran down towards the river and then east into the rising sun, running along the valley of the Alpheos. There wasn’t much water in the river, which left a perfectly flat flood plain clear, and in the cool of the early morning, it was easy running.

I was not the only one to think so. By the time I was breathing hard and having to concentrate a little on my run – perhaps six stades or so – I heard hooves behind me, and in about as long as it takes for a man to recite a hundred lines of Homer, a pair of horsemen passed me – naked, but already wearing big patassos hats to protect them from the sun. They waved and rode on – both entries, as it turned out, in the young horse events.

After they returned – with further salutes – I had the valley to myself. I ran along, avoiding the occasional goat, for another ten stades, and I felt better. In fact, as I turned at the base of a breast-shaped hill, I felt so good that I determined to run back to camp and find myself a porne. A flute girl.

So I was running west along the edge of Alpheos – I won’t call it a bank, because there’s almost no channel in Hekatombaion, a full nine moons after the New Year. I probably had a broad smile on my face.

I heard hooves.

I had time to think that whoever it was, was a fool for pushing his animals at full gallop this close to the races, and then the low dust cloud at the edge of the river disgorged a racing four-horse chariot without a driver.

I think I ran six or seven more paces at it before I realised that the driver was still in the chariot. The gods had decreed he not die – he was fallen in a curled ball in the base of the car, his head lolling dangerously over the back lintel.

Chariots are very light. The base of a good racing chariot is nothing but sinew woven as tightly as possible to provide a springy floor for the charioteer, who, if trained the way I was trained, drives standing with his toes on the yoke bar and his heels on the sinew.

Something had gone wrong. And the horses were utterly panicked – eyes wide, flecks of spittle all over their chests, sweat pouring down.

And it was the Spartan chariot.

Runaway chariots were a steady part of my young life on Hipponax’s farm. We actually practised boarding and recovering galloping chariots. It happened all too often. One moment’s inattention – horses are the dumbest brutes in all creation – and you are flat on your back on the dirt, and your team is vanishing over the distant horizon.

So I turned and ran south, away from the river – and then made a tight turn in, so I was running east again, into the rising sun, parallel to the river but ten horse-lengths away. The team was galloping right along the bank – horses can be like that – and while the offside leader knew I was there, the rest of the team was too busy being afraid of their own shadows.

While the chariot was still behind me, I ran – diagonally – across its front. I timed it well – by Zeus, I’d done it often enough – and the horses were tired already and slowing. I put up a hand, got a fistful of mane, caught the leather of the collar and leapt. In a heartbeat, I was astride the surly bastard – I mean the horse.

I had them walking in twenty strides. I was worried for the charioteer – I’d never seen a man fall inside his own chariot – but I was worried for the team, too. I turned them on the flat plain – from astride the offside horse. They were as happy to halt as I was to halt them, and then followed a fairly ludicrous time as I sorted out the reins and tried to calm them. All before I could look after the poor charioteer, who was, of course, young Polypeithes, the Spartan.

He had a bruise the size of an egg on the front of his forehead and he was breathing badly, and I discovered he’d swallowed his tongue. I got it out – I’d seen it done – and laid him on the grass by the river and splashed him with water, which accomplished nothing but getting him wet.

After a wait, I lifted him carefully – I still thought he might have a broken bone, or, worst of all, a broken back – and put him on the floor of the chariot, and then I drove it – slowly – back towards camp.