teeth and good teeth. Pater started the song and every voice picked it up. We sang the first verse standing and then the whole army – Athenians and Plataeans – moved forward.
Perhaps our line wasn't perfect, but I remember it as perfect. And when we were a spear's length from the Euboeans, I knew we'd won. A veteran at the age of thirteen, I knew as surely as if Athena sat on one shoulder and Ares on the other that the men of Euboea would break when our shields hit theirs.
We must have had a bow in our line – because Pater and Bion hit them a heartbeat before the rest of the line, or perhaps the Euboean line had a curve in it. We hit, and the front opened like a door. Pater's helmet flashed in the brilliant noontime sun, and his plumes shone like the wings of some god-sent bird, and we gave a great shout as the aspides clashed and their line broke up the way a pot breaks when dropped on flagstones from a height.
Even as the Euboeans broke, I saw Pater fall. I saw the way his head turned, and I saw that he fell forward as if pushed, and I know now as if I had seen it that Simon had stabbed him in the back, under his back plate. But I couldn't see, and battle deprives a man of many of his wits. All I thought at the time was that Pater was down, though the battle was already won.
Pater was down. Somehow I got my legs on either side of his chest and stood my ground, because the Euboeans weren't beaten. Their front ranks crumbled but then stiffened, much as ours must have done against the Spartans, and they came back at us like men. I saw Simon with a short sword in his hand, dripping blood. He was green, his lips were white with fear and his eyes met mine.
I didn't see it – oh, I'll tell it in its place. But that's when the Euboeans counter-attack struck, and I wasn't in the fourth rank any more, because I wouldn't give over Pater's body. I had no idea if he was alive or dead, but I stood my ground like a fool, and then, in that moment, I found out why old men and poets call it the storm of bronze. I got my dead brother's aspis up, and the hammering knocked me down over Pater – I was too small to stand the pressure of ten or fifteen weapons beating against my shield.
But other Plataeans crowded in around me. They saw who was down and they were men, too. They pushed and killed. I could smell the copper of blood, the heavy waft of excrement that men release when they go down, the cardamom and onions they'd eaten for lunch. I got a knee under me and pushed my spear under the press and felt the soft, yielding resistance of flesh as I cut some poor bastard's sinews.
Then I took my first wound. It's this one, see? And it saved my life, as you'll hear. Right through the top of the thigh, honey – some big bastard stood over me and pushed his spear right down over my aspis. It didn't cut the muscle, praise to Ares, but I went down, blood spurting between my fingers, with Deer Killer forgotten in the Euboean grass. I fell on top of Pater.
I made the mistake of falling forward over my shield, and some Euboean bastard hit me on the head.
When I awoke, I was rolling in my own filth and vomit, wearing the shackles of a slave. Part II Some Made Slaves War is the king and father of all, and some he shows as gods, others as men; some men are freed, and some are made slaves. Heraclitus, fr. 53
6
Hard to imagine what that awakening was like for me.
I had a fever. My wound was oozing pus – not that I knew that yet, I was off my head. And I had never been on a ship. I had no idea why I was wet, why the world swayed, why it was so cold.
It didn't take me long to know, to know, honey, that I was dead and in Tartarus for some forgotten sin. I didn't think that I was dead. I knew it. I flailed and swallowed my own filth. I was shackled under a rowing bench in the bottom rank of rowers. No one expected me to row – only free men rowed, back then – but I was shackled flat with eight other slaves, destined for market. Not that I understood. I knew nothing.
I went down again.
I awoke a second time when a tall man poured water over me while another man held his nose. They looked at the pus – that's when I saw my leg, red and angry and inflamed – and flinched. The tall man with the pointed beard prodded my leg and I was gone again.
I surfaced a third time in a pen, somewhere in Asia, I learned. I wasn't shackled, but my thigh still bled pus like a boy's spots. I had a fever like a child. And the other slaves – there were hundreds – avoided me as if I had the plague. For all they knew, I did. Slaves don't help each other, honey. That lesson hits you right away, when you go from the brotherhood of the phalanx to slavery.
I was never completely out again. I raved – and no one bought me. I wasn't worth an obol. The wound on my thigh wept pus, as they say, and because of it, no one buggered me, not even the sick bastards who live at the bottom of the muck of the slave trade. No one made me play their flute, or any of the other things they do to slave boys and girls. You ever wonder why Harmonia flinches every time you move your hand, honey? You don't want to know.
Have you seen the kind of slaves who sit in corners rambling, talking crazy, and never raise their eyes? No – you haven't. I never buy 'em, not even for rough work. People can be broken, just like toys.
I missed being broken because I was so disgusting. Bless the Lord of the Silver Bow and his deadly arrows. His ravens sit on my shield to this day because of that beautiful, stinking pus. I watched it – they raped a boy until he stopped complaining just a spear's length from where I lay. He was Thracian, and he got up silently from their abuse and killed himself, ripping his guts out with a stick, but few are so determined. Honey, you have no idea what a person can put up with, what depth of cowardice we discover when, by small surrenders, we can stay alive. Eh?
Oh, yes. Me, too. I'm sure I'd have given in. I was just a boy, and unlike the brave Thracian, I was utterly disoriented. I couldn't imagine how I'd come to be a slave, and I couldn't get my feet under me, so to speak, and I had a wound.
The slaves themselves prey on the weak. Oh yes! No honour among slaves. I had no food – ever. No honest boy came and brought me bread. They ate my gruel and my soup, and one day I awoke to find two bigger boys discussing my squalor and deciding I wasn't worth 'a fuck' – pardon me, honey, but they meant it. And then they pulled up their rags and pissed on me.
This is harder for you than the death of Pater, isn't it? Hard to picture the noble aristocrat as a victim, your own father with boys raining yellow urine in contempt. Hard to imagine me as a worthless slave. The dishonour. The shame. Eh?
Listen, honey – you know what Achilles says? Better to be the slave of a bad master than King of the Dead. Right? I was alive.
I told you that I tell the truth, at least as I remember it. Who is this fellow you've brought to listen to me? You look like an Ionian, young man. Well – eat well. You are my guest, and guest-friendship still counts for something, eh?
Odd as it sounds, I've always thought that the urine saved me. Being pissed on. It made me angry, and I think it washed the wound. Persians and Aegyptians use piss that way. Maybe not. Maybe the Deadly Archer simply looked the other way and I healed.
But, by the Lady, I was weak. I was so weak that I couldn't stand. I hadn't eaten for two weeks at least. I didn't even know where I was, but I knew that I was angry, and I wasn't going to die so that they could defecate on my corpse. I decided that I had to eat. And to eat, I had to fight off all comers and take food. The thing is, I couldn't fight. I could barely drag myself to the place where the food trough was filled. The boys who ate the most food were bigger, tougher, and none of them had a wound.
I'd like to say that I thought of something noble, like the Plataeans at Oinoe. They didn't win by fighting better. They merely refused to break. Fair enough. But I didn't really have a thought in my head. I was an animal. I decided that if I could endure pain, I could eat. I noticed that other slaves tried to take their food off into a corner and eat, like animals on a kill ripping a haunch and running. But it occurred to me in my feverish desperation that I could simply eat while they beat me. I'd tear food out of their hands and put it in my mouth. I've seen a starving cat do the same, on a wharf in Aegypt.
That was my plan, and it worked well enough.
It only worked because they feared the guards.
