taking orders, which may seem a foolish comment from a former slave, but it was true. Still, I did well enough, and the men in my file were all veterans, at least of some raids and a siege or two, and I had plenty to learn about camping and eating and keeping clean. I was amazed at how much time the Athenians spent on their gear – polishing and cleaning with pumice and tallow and scraps of tow, every spare moment.
Agios was my file-closer in the eighth rank. He was a well-known man, and at sea he was a helmsman – far too important to serve in the front rank and get killed, or so I understood. He and Herk were peers, and good friends. Later, they were my friends, but on the march to Sardis, Agios had few good words for me. Even as I was amazed at how hard the Athenians worked on their gear, so Agios was disgusted with how careless I was with mine. It was there – marching to Sardis – that I learned how much of the business of war was in maintenance.
My mood was black – so black that I have no memory of marching upriver to Sardis. We crossed the mountains through the pass, I assume, but I don't remember it. I had to carry my own gear because I had no slave. I don't remember anything of that, either, although I must have sweated like a pig and been the laughing stock of the Athenian taxeis.
I had a hard time with Briseis in my head. I hated her, and yet, even then, I knew that I was lying to myself. I didn't hate her. I understood her. But I also knew that my life had been smashed – again – as thoroughly as my enslavement had smashed it.
I was locked inside the prison of my head for the whole march. It rained and I was wet and at the top of the pass it was cold. I know that my friends talked to me – Stephanos and Epaphroditos and Heraklides, because they all referred to it later. But I remember nothing but a waking nightmare of the loss of Hipponax and Archi – and Briseis.
Hipponax and Archi were in the same army I was in – there were only eight or nine thousand of us, all in, and I saw both of them every day, at a distance. They must have known that I was with the army, marching just a stade or two from them. I do remember wanting to go to them, every day – a yearning to face them, to receive blows or embraces. I think I believed that they would commiserate with me. Now, I shake my head.
We were fifteen days marching on Sardis, and despite our long delay at Ephesus, we caught the city unawares. Which will give you an idea of how badly prepared the Medes were for us. I think that Artaphernes never really believed that men he had counted as friends and guest-friends – men like Aristagoras and Hipponax – would actually march on him. And so great was the name of Darius, King of Kings, that no man had ever dared to strike at him. Amongst the Ionians, they talked openly of conquering Persia. Amongst the Athenians, they laughed and talked about increasing their trade with Ionia. No man so much as mentioned Persia. I remember that, too.
At any rate, the Persians were unprepared.
When we came down the pass, the scouts told us that the gates of the great city – one of the richest in Asia – were open.
We lost all order. The whole army broke into a mass of sprinting soldiers racing for the gates. At least, that's how it seemed to me, and I was close to the front. Aristides roared like a bull to make us stand our ground, and we ignored him and raced for the nearest gates.
I followed Herk. He was fast, but nothing like me, and I loped easily, keeping pace. The rest of our file fell behind – Herk wasn't the fastest, but he had stamina. Other men caught us, and a few passed us, but the upshot was that a dozen of us came to the Ephesus Gate of Sardis, just around the hour men leave the agora, and the gates were open.
Even as we ran up, the Lydian gate-guards finally decided that they were in peril and began to close the great wooden doors – or perhaps they closed them every day in late afternoon.
Herk threw himself at the nearest door and men joined him. I flashed through the narrowing gap and my spear caught a Lydian and killed him, and the other guards broke and fled and the gates were ours, and I was the first man in the city.
Then I saw men behave as animals, and men treated as animals, and it was amidst the slaughter that I awoke from my nightmares of the loss of Hipponax and family and Briseis. I found myself in the wreckage of the agora, watching a trio of Eretrians raping a girl while others looted the stalls in an orgy of destruction, like animals let loose from cages. Oh, you haven't seen what men are until you see them let loose inside a city.
I did nothing to stop it. It was happening all about me. And my sword was red, and blood dripped down my hand.
The storming of a city is the grimmest of man's acts, and the one most likely to draw the wrath of the gods. Sardis was defenceless, and the men and women of the city had never resisted us, or done us any hurt greater than taking some of our money in their trades. But we butchered them like lambs.
Some fools set fire to the Temple of Cybele, and that sacrilege was repaid a hundredfold later. But worse was to come.
The initial assault took the city, but we had no officers and no enemy to fight, so we all became looters and rapists, roving criminal bands. The men of the town gathered, first to fight the temple fire and then to resist us, and as the flames spread, they were driven towards the central agora.
Because we had no leadership and no order, we didn't storm the citadel. I was no better than the rest – I assumed that the city had fallen. I stood in the agora, watching the city burn, refusing to rape and contemptuous of the looters, and I watched the other side of the market fill with men – panicked men, I assumed.
And then Artaphernes was there. His armour glittered in the fires, and he led the Lydians of the town and his own picked men of the citadel straight at us, and the Greeks were scattered the way sheep are scattered by wolves.
I saw Artaphernes coming. Greeks ran past me and some were already casting aside their shields. That's how bad we were. We must have outnumbered the Lydians three or four to one, and they scattered us.
When the attack came, Herk was stripping a gold-seller's stall like a professional sea wolf, which he was. 'Fuck,' he said. 'I knew this was too easy.'
He began to blow on his sea whistle, and I fell in next to him. He had his shield and I had mine, and other men who were not utterly in the grip of chaos and panic joined us, and in a few moments we were a hundred men. I noted that the man on my right was the athlete from Eretria, Eualcidas, whose friend I had thrown from the symposium. War makes strange shield-fellows. Agios was close on me, standing behind Herk.
The Lydians stopped short of us.
That was their mistake, because as soon as the other Greeks saw the Lydians halt, they turned and became men. So it is in any fight.
Aristides was there, then. He ran across the front rank and praised us for standing, a few quick words, and more men joined us, Chians, mostly. Our shield wall covered the agora, and we were four or five men deep – not a proper phalanx, but a deep line of mixed men.
Then the Lydians came at us. They weren't big men, or well armoured, except Artaphernes' bodyguard in the centre, where I was. And the fates laughed, because the man coming at me in the fire-lit afternoon light was Cyrus, with his three friends around him. They halted ten paces from us, to see if we would give way, but we had Aristides to give us some wood in our backbones, and we shuffled but held.
Artaphernes' men began to shoot at us with powerful bows at close range. Eualcidas on my right took an arrow through his shield into his shield arm – that's how strong their bows were close up. I saw that Heraklides slanted his, and I did the same, and then, under cover of my shield, I got the shaft out of Eualcidas's arm and two other Eretrians dragged him to the rear. The next man to stand beside me got Cyrus's arrow in his ankle – I saw the shot – and then Aristides exposed himself to the fire and ran along the front, ordering us to kneel behind our shields, and we did. He was magnificent. He was only a couple of years older than me, and I wanted to be him.
So I indulged in some bravado of my own. I called Cyrus's name until he saw me, and I stood up and took off my helmet. Arrows rattled on my shield, and one pinked my naked thigh above my greaves, scraping along the muscle without penetrating.
'Cyrus!' I roared.
He raised his axe over his head and waved it at me. 'You fool!' he called, and laughed. The Greeks around me wondered aloud how I knew a Persian, one of the elite, and I laughed.
And then their line stopped shooting and charged us.
Artaphernes led his men from the front. Never believe all that crap about the Medes whipping their men forward – that's the slaves they sometimes use as living shields. The real Persians and Medes – like Cyrus and
