I thanked him for the thought. What I needed most was sleep.
Before my door a man was waiting. He was past thirty, brown as leather and packing arms like a mercenary. He grinned at me.
“You're putting me out of business, you know?” He had made his seat upon the stones, taking his breakfast of bread dipped in wine.
I asked his name.
“Telamon. Of Arcadia.”
I had heard of him; he was an assassin. Curious, I invited him in.
“If you're going to slice veins for a living,” he chided, “at least have the decency to charge for it. Else how may a poor man compete?”
I told him I was giving it up for the Prometheia. A penance.
“A noble gesture,” he observed. I liked him. I gave him what bread I had and he took it, stowing it in his pack alongside a brace of wrapped onions. He was shipping out in ten days, a brigade under Lamachus to raid the Peloponnese. He could get me on if I wanted. “Your work lacks subtlety, I hear. Post with me, I'll instruct you.”
“Another time perhaps.”
Rising, he left a coin upon the chest. He would not hear my protests. “I expect pay, and I offer it.”
From the doorway I watched him trek off bearing his ninety pounds of kit, then turned back to the denuded interior of my own house of death.
Perhaps something had changed. At least, I told myself, I was being offered work.
Book III:
X
I did not take up Alcibiades' offer of a commission or follow Telamon into mercenary service. I did heed the Arcadian's advice, however, and shipped out as an armored infantryman under Eucles to the Thracian Chersonese. That campaign concluded, discovering myself yet among the living, I enlisted upon another, equally gloryless, and another after that.
It was a new kind of war we were fighting, or so we bucks of the heavy infantry were enlightened by our elders of the Old Corps. In their day men fought battles. They armed and contended line against line, victory determined in honorable trial of arms. This was not how we did it. Our war was not just state against state, but faction against faction within states-the Few against the Many, those who had versus those who lacked.
As Athenians we sided with the democrats, or more accurately compelled all who sought our aid to become democrats, with the understanding that their democracy would be only so democratic as we permitted. Assaulting a city in this new kind of war, one contended not against heroes united in defense of their homeland, but that gang of partisans which chanced to possess the state at the moment, while one's allies were those of the exiled faction, aligned with us, the invaders, to effect their restoration.
At Mytilene I saw my first list. Our company had been assigned its exiles, those democrats of the city who had been deposed in the oligarchic revolt and now constituted a species of political
auxiliary to the Athenian troops of the assault. I had never seen such men. They were neither warriors nor patriots but zealots. The one with us was named Thersander. We called him Quill. I was a sergeant then; our captain called us in to receive the list.
The list was a death warrant. It enrostered those of Quill's countrymen whom, the city taken, it would be our company's chore to arrest and execute. Quill had made up the list; he would accompany us in the syllepsis, the roundup, to identify those upon it. You have seen such catalogs, Jason. They are written in blood.
Quill's was no impartial manifest of civil foes or political opponents; his accounted neighbors and friends, comrades and kinsmen who had in their hour wreaked ruin upon him. They had slaughtered his wife and daughters. His brother had been torn from the altar and butchered before his own children's eyes. I had never known one to hate as Quill. He was no longer a man but a vessel into which hatred had been decanted. There was no negotiating with one like him, and they were all like him.
Later when the city fell, our company held eighty-two captives of the lists, Quill's and others, including six women and two boys.
It was raining, in sheets behind a warm west wind, so you sweated amid the drenching. We herded the prisoners into stock pens.
Another Mytilenean, not Quill but a confederate, appeared with our instructions. We were to put the detainees to death.
How, I ask, are such orders to be carried out? Not philosophically but practically. Who steps forth to propose the means? Not the best, I assure you. Incinerate them, cried one of our rear rank; seal them in the barn and torch it. Another wished to butcher them like sheep. I refused the order in its entirety.
Quill's abettor confronted me. Who had bribed me? Did I know I was a traitor?
I was young; outrage overcame me. “How will I command these?” I exclaimed, indicating my men. “How may I call them to soldierly duty after they have committed such atrocities? They will be ruined!”
Quill appeared. These are the enemy, he cried, indicating the wretches in the sheepfold.
Kill them yourself, I told him.
He thrust the list in my face. “I'm putting your name on it!”
My own hot temper was all that saved me as, seizing his board and scribing the mark with my own hand, this action so maddened my antagonist as to make him assault me bodily, the ensuing uproar overthrowing momentarily the impetus to mass murder.
Yet let me not style myself deliverer. The poor devils were massacred next day by another company and I, busted to private soldier, shipped off again to the North.
The years passed as if being lived by another. I glance back upon enlistments and discharges, pay vouchers and correspondence, bronze heads extracted from my own flesh and cached as souvenirs at the bottom of my pack; I dig out trinkets and mementos, the names of men and women, lovers indeed, jotted upon the felt of my helmet cawl and scratched with a blade edge into the straps of my rucksack. I remember none.
The season transited as in a single night, that species of slumber from which one awakens at intervals, fitful and feverish, and can reclaim by morning nothing save the sour smell of his own tortured bedding. It seemed I came to myself again before Potidaea, besieging the place a second time seven years after the first. I cannot say now if it was dream or real.
For two winters after my wife's death, I felt no call to passion.
This was neither virtue nor grief, only despair. Then one night I entered the whores' camp and never left. You understand the reckoning of accounts, my friend. Tote this up for me. How much in wages, and don't fail to include mustering bonuses and dividends of discharge, may a soldier accrue who remains upon campaign, retiring not even in winter except to recover from wounds, for a decade entire? A tidy sum, I'd imagine. Enough to buy a handsome little farm, with stock and hands and even a comely wife.
I fucked away every farthing. Screwed it or drank it, and in the end could not credit even my own recall that I had once harbored aspirations for myself.
Peace came, the so-called Peace of Nicias, whereunder both sides, exhausted from years of strife, contracted to retire until they could recover breath, scratching in the interval lines beyond which each vowed not to trespass. I came home. Alcibiades was thirty now, elected to the chief executive of the state, the Board of Ten Generals, the same post his guardian Pericles had held. But his star had not yet gained preeminence. Nicias held sway, his elder
