Not that I knew any of this. I just ran, and the only sound I could hear was my feet on the gravel. It was like running for a prize.
I ran fifty paces – perhaps more – before they began to shoot at me. It wasn't the storm from before, either – it was a steady impact of single shafts against my shield. Something stung my foot, and then I felt a blow like the kick of a mule against my shin, but again the greave held and still I ran forward.
And then the world cleared for me. It is hard to describe, really. I was running and then, as if my eyes had been closed, I was running like a god. I felt as if I was a god. I had been running with my aspis held in front, and high, which made me blind to everything but the ground under my feet. Now I let my shield go down a fraction, and I ran looking at the Medes.
And they were close.
I have so much to say about this that I will only bore you, thugater. Except that something changed, and it was as if I could see, having been blind. I could see that I was going to live. I could see that I was about to be a hero. Athena granted me this, I think, or my ancestor Heracles.
Twenty paces from their shield wall, I decided not to slow down.
It is worth saying that when men run at a shield wall, they slow as they close in the last three or four paces. They have to, or they risk being spitted in the knee or thigh by a cool hand. And most men correctly dread the moment when they crash into the enemy's shield. You are vulnerable, then. You could fall.
I didn't even slow. I lengthened my stride like a runner finishing a race, as if a garland or a crown of laurel waited for me.
An arrow rang off the front of my helmet so hard that I almost lost my balance. And then I smashed into their wall, and all the sight and sound and smell of it hit me at once.
I killed men.
No man killed me. I didn't know it at the time, but I was one of just two men to reach their wall. But we did reach it, and I was told afterwards that we knocked holes in their shield wall like a big iron awl punching bronze.
The phalanx was close behind us, and no arrows were falling on them. They roared, although I didn't hear it. I was in a world no bigger than the blood-soaked ground beneath my sandals and the limits of my helmet. I remember that blows fell on that helmet like Pater's hammer on his anvil, and more blows glanced off the scales on my back and slashed my outer thighs and my right arm, but I refused to stop. I remember that. I remember deciding that I would go all the way through them and see what happened then. I pushed and stomped and killed, and I have no memory of fighting the spearmen, but only of killing archers, hacking their faces and their bows and pushing forward, always forward, and the pain of the blows on my back and my helmet, and then, faster than I tell it, I was through. I was against the rock face of the pass, and I turned. Both my spears were gone – the gods know where – and I drew my sword, put my back to the rock and cut at every Persian who came forward.
They were brave. A dozen of them, rear-rankers, inexperienced men, pressed at me. They had neither shields nor spears, and they were not much, hand to hand, and they pressed me clumsily, and despite the ringing in my head, I killed them. Not all of them. Just enough to make the rest pause and doubt themselves.
Then there was pressure, the kind of pressure you get in a nightmare, and I was crushed against big rock, and the aspis pushed into my neck and thighs, and I cried out from the pain of it.
And then men were screaming my name, and it was over.
Eualcidas was the first to embrace me. He pushed his helmet back on his brow and he was shaking from head to foot and had an arrow clean through his helmet.
'By Ares,' he said. 'I knew you were beautiful!'
And in those five minutes, in the time that the water-clocks give a man to speak his mind in the assembly, I was no longer a man.
I became a hero.
Most of the other eight men who ran with us were dead or badly wounded. Only Eualcidas and I had made the enemy line. And we had hurt the Medes badly, killing fifteen and downing another twenty. We had captives.
I was so dazed that I was sick. I threw up on the rocks, and Heraklides held my hair. Then we went back down the pass to where we had started. The slaves buried our dead and we waited in the sun. I drank the water men gave me, and then I drained the water and wine in my canteen.
Eualcidas came by. 'If they come back, will you do it again?' he asked.
I grinned. 'Of course,' I said.
It was like madness, or the smell of fine wine, or that moment when a woman lets her peplos fall but before you can touch her.
You want to know what makes Achilles different from the other men among the noble Achaeans? Homer must have known some killers of men. He knew us. Because any man – any good man, and the world is full of them – can stand his ground one fine day. He sets his mind – or he is angry, or simply young. And he will stand his ground and kill, fighting his fears and his enemies together. We honour those men.
But the killers come alive when there is nothing left but that fear and the rush of spirit, when all of your life falls away and you are the edge of your sword and the point of your spear. The killers will fight every day, not one fine day. Eualcidas was serious. He knew we might have to run into the arrow storm again – and now that he had my measure, he wanted me to run with him.
And of course, I wanted to go.
No, that doesn't mean I wasn't afraid. I was terrified. But I had to feel that terror again – and again.
But they didn't come back, and an hour after dark, we marched away into the torch-lit darkness, down the rest of the pass and on to the plain.
14
Artaphernes followed us on to the plains, but now he had Lydian cavalry and some Medes, and they harried our retreat. We had bought Aristagoras a day, only for him to squander it like the fool he was. And so, just two days later, while my wounds were still un-healed and the aches from the fight at the pass were at their height, he forced us to battle.
Aristagoras arrayed us. He hated the Athenians by then, and he was visibly afraid – a traitor in a losing rebellion. Eualcidas didn't hide his contempt, and Aristagoras retaliated like any petty tyrant, by putting us on the left and questioning our courage. He put his Milesians on the right, opposite the Medes, and he put the Ephesians in the centre with the Chians and the Lesbians. He set the lines in full view of Artaphernes. The satrap responded by moving his best infantry – Carians, who later joined the rebellion – against us. Unlike Aristagoras, Artaphernes never believed his own propaganda. He knew that the Athenians and the Euboeans were the most dangerous.
Aristagoras set our lines in the late afternoon of the second day after the fight in the pass. We stood in our places until the shadows were long, and then we walked back to our fires and ate. I didn't have a slave, but Cleon's slave, a surly Italian boy, made me stew and took my coppers with carefully hidden delight.
Eualcidas and I sat together after we ate. Most men thought us lovers. Perhaps, if things had gone otherwise, we might have been lovers, because he was Patroclus in every way that mattered, and perhaps I was Achilles. At any rate, we sat and talked, and other men came and sat with us – not just Athenians or Euboeans, either. Epaphroditos came with some men of Lesbos, and there were Chians and even Milesians around that fire. We drank wine and Eualcidas's singer – he had a rhapsode – gave us a thousand lines of the Iliad. His son sang another poem, and Stephanos came, clasped my hand and drank wine with me.
Men treated me differently. I liked it. I liked being lord. I was a hero, and other heroes accepted me as such. We lay on sheepskins and listened to the Iliad and drank wine, and life was good.
Here's a truth for you, thugater. War is sweet, when you are one of the heroes.
Late in the evening, Archilogos turned up. He stood in the firelight until I saw him. I rose and went to embrace him, but he held his hand between us.
'We are not friends,' he said.
I remember nodding. I understood then, perhaps for the first time, that it was not possible for us to be
